Mohave County will debut new ballot paper with added security measures in July primary
Officials in Mohave County, Arizona, walked into a public meeting last year with bad news for their bosses.
The rural, bright-red county wanted to adopt a type of ballot paper with watermarks, embedded fibers, microprinting, and other security features for future elections. Its elected supervisors had previously voted to approve a new contract for such paper with Runbeck Election Services, a voting materials company in Phoenix, because they firmly believed the change would improve voter confidence.
But election officials had recently tested the paper, called Ballot Guard, with the county’s vote-tabulating machines and found that it wasn’t performing as hoped.
A team of staffers took the podium to lay out the situation. The paper, they said, caused the tabulators to pull multiple pages at once, leading to paper jams and other errors that required rerunning ballots. ES&S, the company that manufactured the county’s tabulators, had done its own tests and seen similar results.
https://www.votebeat.org/arizona/2026/07/02/mohave-county-runbeck-ballot-paper-watermarks-security-2026-election/