Inside a secure Arizona facility printing millions of election ballots

Phoenix — Inside a secure facility with armed guards in Phoenix, Arizona, the sound of democracy reverberates as ballots are printed, sorted, stuffed and shipped.

The Runbeck Election Services facility near the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport will print about 35 million ballots for counties in eight states for the November election, including Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado, Texas, Utah, Florida and Illinois. 

“We don’t over-print anything,” said Jeff Ellington, Runbeck’s CEO. “So every step, as we go through, we print exactly what the counties asked for.”

By the time voting ends on Nov. 5, the facility will use about 6,000 miles of paper to print up to 1.5 million ballots a day, enough to fill 51 semi-trucks, and weighing about the same as two Boeing 747s.

Runbeck takes a picture of each ballot and checks it for thickness. Ellington says attempting to replicate these ballots would be difficult.

“It’s got to be on the right paper, the tolerances to cut a ballot are shockingly tight, I mean, they’re three decimal places, and it’s not 8.5-by-11 sheets of paper,” Ellington explains.

For example, Arizona’s Maricopa County alone, which includes Phoenix, has “about 15,000 different ballot styles,” he adds.

The kind, thickness and color of the paper can vary by the machine tabulating the ballot, which varies by county. So does the design and layout of the ballot itself.

Furthermore, every single ballot is tracked throughout the process.

“There’s a secure process where the chain of custody of all of these ballots, from paper to ballots, going to the election office, to the ballots going to the voters, is all maintained under rigorous circumstances,” said David Becker, CBS News elections expert and political contributor.

Becker says 95% of all voters in this election, including all voters in battleground states, will vote on paper ballots. Becker says those ballots are “auditable and verifiable.”

Runbeck works 30 states and Washington, D.C., and a growing part of its business now centers around election security.

“We recently started selling panic buttons to counties because of all the threats to poll workers,” Ellington said.

So far, the company has sold about 1,000 panic buttons to different counties. When pressed, the button alerts 911.

“There’s a lot of concern,” Ellington said. 

Kris Van Cleave

Emmy Award-winning journalist Kris Van Cleave is the senior transportation correspondent for CBS News based in Phoenix, Arizona, where he also serves as a national correspondent reporting for all CBS News broadcasts and platforms.