Billing: Document Outdated November 4, 2020 shows election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona fraudulently accepted 18,000 votes after Election Day 2020.
AP Rating: Wrong. Forms Used by Maricopa County Election Officials It is misrepresented as evidence that ballots were received after Election Day. This form is actually a receipt confirming that an early ballot in an unopened envelope (received before the Election Day deadline) was given to a private vendor for scanning. a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Authority told his Associated Press. A vendor, he is the CEO of Runbeck Election Services, who also confirmed the purpose of the form.
Fact: Images of the form were widely shared on social media and contained false claims that showed Maricopa County officials improperly counted thousands of votes following the 2020 general election. I’m here.
The form has the header “MC INBOUND – RECEIPT OF DELIVERY” and a date of November 4, 2020, the day after the election. Below is a series of rows and columns. On the left are rows with titles such as “LATES” and “POST OFFICE INBOUND”. One of the columns is titled “QTY OF PIECES” and has a handwritten “18,000” on the top line of the column.
“BREAKING: Maricopa County received 18,000 ballots after Election Day,” one Twitter user wrote on Saturday, along with an image of the form. The tweet was shared over 1,000 times.
Megan Gilbertson, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Office, said the form in the image is real, but Ballots received late after the Election Day deadline will not be displayed.
“It’s not the receipt from when you first got the envelope,” Gilbertson said, referring to a form circulating online.
“This is a record of when the envelope was forwarded to the vendor and scanned,” she added. “These are early voting receipts received before 7:00 p.m. on Election Day.”
Ballot envelopes provided to Runbeck Election Services will be scanned so that Maricopa County staff can match the signatures on the outside of the ballot with county records to verify their authenticity. The ballot will be returned to the county and the verified ballot will be tallied.
Gilbertson said state law allows counties five business days from Election Day to address questionable signatures on ballot envelopes.
Jeff Ellington, CEO of Runbeck Election Services, confirmed that the forms were documented when the company received batches of ballots.
“It’s just a handover,” Ellington said of the form. “This is what they’re bringing in and this is what we’re embracing.”
Some 934 early votes were cast in the second half of the November 2020 general election, According to Maricopa CountyThe county will store early ballots received after the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day, but those ballots will not count in the election, Gilbertson said. like that Ballots will continue to be provided to vendors and scanned to determine the number of late received ballots for record keeping purposes.
Forms circulating online are not marked to indicate late receipt of ballots, Gilbertson added.
“None of those votes are late,” she said. “If a vote is late, mark it as ‘late’ in that section. ”
President Joe Biden won over 45,000 votes for Maricopa County and over 10,500 votes for Arizona in the 2020 election. AP reported November 2020. AP review Of all potential voter fraud cases in battleground states published in December 2021, 198 cases were identified in Arizona, less than 2% of Biden’s state win margin. was.
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Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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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.
