Trump campaign expert witness Colonel Phil Waldron confirmed the SharpieGate scandal during Arizona’s hearing on election integrity on Monday.
Republican voters on election day in Maricopa County in Arizona reported that they were forced to use Sharpies, rather than ballpoint pens, and were concerned that there would be bleedthroughs, and therefore invalidate the ballots. The hashtag “SharpieGate” went viral, with Arizona voters posting their concerns all over social media.
“There were two people in front of me that used the Sharpie that was given to them by the poll workers, it did not read their ballot, and they slide it in there twice. I used a pen. I took their Sharpie and threw it away and it read my ballot,” one woman said at the time.
During Monday’s hearing in Arizona on election integrity, Colonel Phil Waldron, an expert witness, confirmed the scandal’s existence when discussing the topic with former New York mayor and head of the Trump legal team, Rudy Giuliani.
“Tell us about the green button in Maricopa County on the machine,” Giuliani asked Waldron. “There is one witness that is going to testify that all day she saw election officials constantly pressing the green button when somebody was voting.”
“I believe this was also linked to another witness that’s going to talk about the differences between the pens and the sharpies,” Waldron replied. “The Maricopa elections division in early voting they specified to only use ballpoint pens for voting, and then on election day they specified only use sharpies.”
National File confirmed this story earlier this month, with Maricopa County Elections Assistant Director Kelly Dixon identifying issues with ballots being cast using Sharpie markers but still insisting that voters who cast their ballot on November 3 must do so using sharpies.
BUSTED: This internal email from Maricopa County, AZ talks about "Issues and Concerns" with markers but says they have to give voters markers anyway instead of ballpoint pens on Election Day
HUGE! pic.twitter.com/im2NMkC7gC
— Patrick Howley (@HowleyReporter) November 18, 2020
“The idea is that [there would be] bleedthrough on the ballot, [and therefore] the scanners would cause an error ballot,” Waldron continued, and explained what happened with the aforementioned green button:
By creating the error ballot, the election officials would basically slide those votes into a batch file that could be adjudicated by the election administrator or the operator. The green button was to say “okay there’s an error, so go ahead and push ‘cast ballot’,” and it punches that into an error file that can be adjudicated by the election administrator.
Various other electoral discrepancies occurred across Arizona. National File reported that following a failure to sign the Certificate of Accuracy for voting machines, the Maricopa County GOP Chair, Rae Chornenky, resigned.