Today is election day in Phoenix and other cities across the Valley. 

Perhaps you've swung by the polls on your way to work this morning, so did one of The Show’s producers, but when she got there, she noticed the poll workers had some trouble printing her ballot.

"To avoid having to pre-print 125 different ballot styles and make sure that 125 different ballot styles are at each voting center – cause that’s the number of precincts we have in the city – we print ballots on demand," said Ben Lane, Deputy City Clerk for the City of Phoenix.

He said that when there’s a technical snafu – like a printer problem – there are back up procedures. In our case, the ballot was printing crooked on the page, and the poll workers were worried the scanner wouldn’t be able to read her votes.

"The machines do have some leniency in terms of what they’ll read, but if the machine doesn’t read it, it’s what’s known as outstacked," Lane said. "Basically what that means is the machine couldn’t read it and then it gets duplicated by a board."

That’s right, a duplication board, which is a two person board that takes the ballot the machine couldn’t read, and duplicates the votes onto a ballot the machine can read.

"So each vote the voter had, the board marks that again onto a ballot that will be read by the tabulation equipment," Lane said.

And in that case if the printer just goes kaput…each polling place has pre-printed emergency ballots that also have to be duplicated. But Lane says, it’s rare that duplication has to happen at all.

"In terms of the grand scheme of all the ballots we get, I think right now we’ve duplicated 1 percent of all the ballots received," Lane said. "So it’s not a very high number."