Claims: Only voting sites located in conservative areas of Maricopa County, Arizona experienced problems counting ballots on Election Day.
AP Rating: Wrong. According to the Maricopa County Office of Elections, Maricopa County vote centers reported printing issues where some ballots were not being counted in the field, including in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods such as downtown Phoenix and Tempe.
FACT: Voting sites throughout Maricopa County reported problems with ballot counting, bad printformer President Donald Trump, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and social media users suggested the issue only affected sites in conservative areas of Maricopa County.
“We switched from the Republican areas to voting. We went to the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure we had a good machine.” “And what do you think? There was no problem with their machines today. Not a single machine spitting out ballots here today, very liberal.” There isn’t even one in the area.”
Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday about the vote chaos: oh! “
Such claims also circulated independently on social media, with one Instagram user on Wednesday featuring the text, “It’s funny that voting machines have ‘stopped working’ in a Republican-dominated area of ​​Arizona.” I shared an image that I did.
But it’s not. Vote centers in both liberal and conservative parts of Maricopa County were affected by the printing problem, according to a list of locations provided to The Associated Press by Maricopa County Elections Office spokesperson Megan Gilbertson. rice field.
Gilbertson wrote in an email that technicians were dispatched to the listed sites to fix the printing problem.Included Democratic-leaning Glendale, Phoenix, and Tempe sites upon list. One such location was at the Footprint Center, an arena in downtown Phoenix. The other was a Polling Place for the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community.
“It was all over the valley,” said Gilbertson. “At Polling Places Across the Valley.”
“It’s not entirely true that the only vote centers affected are Republican neighborhoods,” said Paul Benz, a Republican pollster based in Phoenix. “There are certainly some Republican areas affected, but there are quite a few more Democratic-leaning areas affected, and a lot of swing areas or very competitive areas.”
Benz added that several vote centers in the Sun City area, home to the Republican Party, did not appear on the list.
“It’s pretty evenly skewed,” said Sam Armey, a Democratic strategist in Phoenix. “We have a couple in West Phoenix, the Tolleson area, and Maryvale. Those are Democratic areas.”
Some counters didn’t read ballots that were turned in in person at polling places in Maricopa County on Tuesday. This was because ballot printers did not produce what are known as “timing marks” that were dark enough for a machine to detect. AP reportedMarks communicate voter information to vote scanners so they can tally their choices.
Voters whose ballots have been rejected are told they can try a second tabulator for that location, put it in a ballot box to be counted at a central facility later, or cancel and go to another vote center. I was. An estimated 70 of the 223 vote centers were affected, according to the county.
Ultimately, about 17,000 out of about 1.56 million votes were affected. These ballots were sent from the Vote Centers to the county’s Central Counting Center for counting.
“The central tallyers seem to be counting votes on Election Day just fine,” Gilbertson said Friday.
As Democrats maintain a narrow lead in the main race in Arizona, election officials in Maricopa County Reporting of results Nearly 300,000 mail-in ballots returned on Election Day Friday from ballot key groups.
Lake’s campaign did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment.
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This is part of AP’s efforts to address widely shared misinformation, including working with outside companies and organizations to add facts to misleading content circulating online. . You can read more about fact checking in AP here.
