Officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, issued a statement on Wednesday, November 9, assuring voters that all legal ballots cast on election day would be counted, despite problems with printers at 70 polling places.

Footage shows the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman, Bill Gates, addressing reporters.

A joint statement from Gates and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman said: "While the issue impacted less than 7% of Election Day voters (about 17,000 ballots), we understand that for people who went through it, this was frustrating, inconvenient, and not how they pictured Election Day. We plan to get to the bottom of it.

“Voters impacted by the printer issue had several ways to cast their ballot yesterday, including dropping their completed ballot into a secure box (door 3) on site. Those ballots will be verified as legitimate and then tabulated at MCTEC. That process is already underway. All ballots will be counted securely and accurately,” the statement added.

Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is locked in a tight race with Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs, also commented on the issue on Tuesday night, citing it as a flaw in the state’s voting system. Credit: Maricopa County via Storyful

Video transcript

BILL GATES: They are on what box three is. These are the ballots-- in-person ballots yesterday, that were not read into the tabulator. We have approximately 17,000 of those ballots that were in box three. So we want to set expectations on that.

First thing is, the team here now is going through the quality assurance on those ballots, making sure that we don't have any double counts, making sure we know exactly what we're looking at here. But to talk about the full number of in-person ballots yesterday, we have about 7% of the total of in-person ballots yesterday that went into box three. So that's-- 17,000 ballots is about 7%.

We had voters who showed up in person to take a ballot, vote it and feed it into a tabulator. And for those who were not able to run that through the tabulator, they put that in this-- what we call box three, that we discussed earlier. So that was around-- a little bit over 250,000 people.

In addition, we also had people who received a early ballot that was recorded. Rich was talking about, as opposed to going in and feeding a ballot through the tabulator, they actually brought in that ballot. What happened yesterday, we cannot have a repeat of. We are already looking very closely at what happened. Obviously, our team was able to come up with a fix yesterday for what happened, so that allowed those vote centers to get back online.

But again, we are going to do a deep dive on this. This board will get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and we will do what needs to be done. The board has demonstrated that in the past when we have had issues, and we'll do that again.