They're printing ballots: Arizona business kicks into high gear as election season begins

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They're printing ballots: Arizona business kicks into high gear as election season begins

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They're printing ballots: Arizona business kicks into high gear as election season begins

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They're printing ballots: Arizona business kicks into high gear as election season begins

How Phoenix company ended up as a hub for the country's mail-in ballots
Andrew Oxford | Arizona Republic
You are an election official and you want to run an election by mail.

You will need a lot of envelopes.

You’re going to need a lot of paper, too, and big printers to handle the dizzying assortment of ballots that can vary from block to block depending on each voter’s school board and City Council district and special taxing district.

The real trick is getting the right ballot to the right voter.

That may seem obvious. But mess up just once — stuff two ballots in an envelope or send a ballot to the wrong address — and you’ve got a scandal on your hands.

Get it right every time, millions of times, and do it very quickly because the politicians and judges won’t stop fighting over what is even on the ballot until a month or so before the ballots have to be in the mail.

So, if you’re going to run an election by mail, there are really only so many people who can help you.

One of them happens to be in Phoenix.

As Arizona lawmakers made it easier to vote by mail over the past couple of decades and voters embraced the practice, the company that handles the mail ballots for the state’s biggest counties ended up on the ground floor of a niche business that is now booming.

More Arizonans than ever before signed up to receive a ballot in the mail this fall. And with communities across the country racing in the middle of a pandemic to set up or drastically expand such systems of their own, Runbeck Election Services has been able to bank on the experience and the sheer capacity it has amassed over the years.

But this will be an election unlike any other, not just for the company’s business but for the public’s trust in the election process itself.

A few weeks every other year
When Kevin Runbeck bought the company from his father in the 1980s, it was a small printing company mostly handling services for commercial clients such as insurance companies.

See what's on your ballot
A fourth-generation Arizonan, Runbeck had been working for the family business after trying his hand at remodeling and flipping houses.

And at the time, elections were just a few months of the company’s work every other year.

Pima County was the biggest such account. At that point, the county would stuff the envelopes once the ballots were printed and handle the rest, Runbeck said.

But the share of voters casting ballots by mail in Arizona has grown, making it harder for counties to handle the work on their own.

In 1991, legislators removed a requirement that voters needed a specific reason for casting an absentee ballot. With that change, any voter could request to vote by mail.

A few years later, the Legislature ditched the term “absentee voting” altogether, relabeling it “early voting” instead.

Democratic and Republican campaigns alike encouraged voters to request a ballot by mail, and the Legislature in 2007 created the Permanent Early Voting List, allowing voters to sign up to receive a mail-in ballot for each election instead of requesting one each time.

Around that time, Maricopa County was processing hundreds of thousands of ballots and signed with Runbeck to manage the job from start to finish.

Other counties followed.

“We had reached the point where we were mailing out about 15,000 or 16,000 early ballots in 2008 and we just couldn’t do it in-house anymore,” Coconino County Recorder Patty Hansen said.

The job demanded long hours and help from lots of staff, she said.

There were not a lot of companies that could take on that kind of job, though, Hansen said.

The county needed 600 varieties of ballots during the recent primary, for example.

So, the county signed on with Runbeck.

Around the same time, election officials in some parts of the country began rethinking touch-screen voting machines.

Amid rising concerns about the security and integrity of electronic voting machines, many officials wanted to move back to paper ballots.

“Everybody is now running back to paper. We had always been in paper. So our business started growing quickly,” Runbeck said.

From side work to the main focus
In a few decades, elections have gone from just a piece of the company’s business — a few months every other year — to its whole mission.

The company moved to a larger facility near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in 2018 and has expanded to another building nearby.

Around this point, the company is staffed by about 180 full-time employees and another 200 seasonal workers.

Stacks of envelopes around the company’s two facilities are labeled with signs showing final destinations, from counties in California to Colorado and Georgia

But if those are the final destinations for each ballot, the journey for each begins on printers that roll out as many as 2 million a day.

Workers feed the ballots along with envelopes into machines that scan each envelope, match it with a voter and stuff the envelope with the right paperwork for each voter.

It's much faster than stuffing envelopes by hand.

The machines also include some security measures meant to stop fraud and mix-ups.

The barcodes allow election officials to match the envelopes they sent out to the envelopes they receive back. If someone tries submitting a ballot inside an envelope that was not logged at the start of the process, it would raise a red flag for election officials.

Machines also weigh each envelope once sealed. An envelope that is too heavy or too light might have been stuffed with the wrong forms or more than one ballot.

Any error could turn into a big problem.

In 2014, a glitch with a scanner that lasted less than a minute meant about 1,000 ballots were stuffed into the wrong envelopes, Runbeck said.

Some of those ballots were meant for Maricopa County voters, and election officials sent replacements.

The company is expecting to handle 31 million ballots for the general election, but the problems with a thousand or so ballots in 2014 did not go unnoticed.

“You guys crucified me,” Runbeck told one visiting reporter when recounting the problem with that scanner.

Fox News showed up in his parking lot after that episode.

And that was a tamer election year.

There was not a president claiming the election process itself was rife with fraud, even before any votes had been cast.

The Postal Service had not undergone changes that would rattle the public’s confidence in whether their ballots could even reach election officials in time.

This year, any mistakes will be amplified and magnified, held up to undermine the outcome of the election altogether.

Runbeck said he gets plenty of questions from acquaintances about the safety and reliability of voting by mail.

But he notes that the isolated cases of fraud that are documented — discarded ballots here or people trying to vote twice there — tend to involve parts of the process well outside anyone’s control at the printing plant.

More ballots, more time in the spotlight
The company had planned for a big election this year.

In December, before the emergence of COVID-19 in the United States, Runbeck ordered as many machines as he could to sort ballots into envelopes. He had five at the time and ended up buying 11 more.

A lot of people would want to vote in this election, he figured.

After all, the 2018 election saw high turnout and the presidential campaign would further energize voters.

The onset of the pandemic went on to pique interest in voting by mail in particular.

By late September, the company had prepared as many ballots in the last few weeks as it had in all of 2016 and the number of voters requesting a ballot in the mail continues to increase.

“We didn’t understand COVID,” Runbeck said, looking back at late 2019. “But we really believed that something big was going to happen.”

Contact Andrew Oxford at andrew.oxford@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter at @andrewboxford.

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