CLAIM: Uncounted ballots mixed with counted ballots at polling places in Maricopa County, Arizona were not included in the final results of the midterm elections.
AP Rating: Wrong. According to her Maricopa County Elections Authority spokeswoman, Megan Gilbertson, such ballots were mixed at two separate vote centers on Election Day, but were properly vetted and counted accurately. I was.
Fact: During the November midterm elections, bad print Tallying machines at dozens of polling places in Maricopa County caused ballots to be rejected on Election Day.
Polling place workers may ask voters whose ballots have been rejected to place their ballots in a secure drop-box, known as “Door 3” or “Box 3,” for later counting at the county’s central counting facility. advised. And while polling station officials had been trained to keep such uncounted ballots separate from those counted in the field, ballots were “returned together.” , Gilbertson wrote in an email to the Associated Press.
As State Certification of achievements This week, a social media post falsely claimed that these ballots did not count toward the final results, citing a video of a self-proclaimed ballot observer speaking at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting on Nov. 28. continued to spread. The woman in the video said such ballots were put together at her polling place “away from Camelback and her 7th Avenue.”
“They mixed the uncounted ballots in Drawer 3 with the tallied ballots,” the woman says in the clip, referring to Box 3. Those are lost votes. Those are the lost voices. One of her Instagram posts sharing a video has garnered more than 19,000 likes.
However, as a prefecture Explained in the days after the election, there was a way to categorize and track such votes, and the votes were counted in the final result. Moreover, Gilbertson said such a mix of votes only occurred at his two polling places: Desert Hills Community Church in North Phoenix and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Gilbert. There are no records of such mixed votes occurring at other vote centers, and the county has not received reports of problems at the polling place described by the woman, Gilbertson told The AP in a call Wednesday. rice field.
“We only encountered this problem on two sites,” says Gilbertson.
Attempts to comment on the woman who made the allegations at the November 28 meeting were unsuccessful.
Affected ballots were quarantined and audited to ensure there were no missing votes or double counting, Gilbertson wrote in an email this week. This includes verifying that the total number of votes cast from vote centers matches the number of voters who have checked into the site. Observers from both parties were present. All Election Day ballots must undergo this process.
“We have redundancy in place to ensure that legal ballots are only counted once,” Gilbertson said. We guarantee that every ballot received will be counted.”
“All Election Day ballots cast in these two locations were tallied and reported in the final results,” she added.
so November report In response to a question from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Elections Office also said it had “recounted the entire ballot” from the two affected vote centers to ensure counting accuracy. claimed.
In the days after the election, Gilbertson said similar mistakes had been made before and the process to address them had been in place for decades. AP reported.
“All polling places in Maricopa County are subject to a reconciliation audit each election,” said Tammy Patrick, former federal compliance officer for the County Elections Office. “It’s been that way for literally over 30 years.”
Patrick said it’s not uncommon for Maricopa County to handle Door 3 ballots and that every election she’s been involved in has had Door 3 ballots.
AP previously reported resemble false claims That includes the door three votes being dropped or marked for the Democratic candidate over the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona.
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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.
