Allegation: Election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona displayed a map of Republican voters in the county at their central tallying facility in Phoenix, but did not have a comparable map of Democratic voters.

AP Rating: Wrong. Both her maps showing past Republican and Democratic voter turnout are displayed at the Maricopa County Elections Authority’s central tallying facility, according to a Maricopa County Elections Authority spokesperson and a photo she provided to the Associated Press. It has been.

Fact: A photo of a heat map showing Republican voters in Maricopa County displayed in a tally center went viral on blogs and social media on Monday, with many users claiming the equivalent Democratic voter map was not shown. bottom. Heat maps use data visualizations to explore information.

“Heat map of Maricopa for Republican voters. No heat map for independents. No heat map for Democrats. loser His bid for Arizona’s secretary of state in the midterm elections was posted on Twitter on Monday.

Similarly, in Monday’s blog post, Maricopa County displayed an “expected” heat map of Republican voters, claiming that the elections office “hadn’t hung a similar Democratic heat map on its wall.”

But it is not correct.Maricopa County Election Authority ExhibitEd Show heat map both About turnout among Republican and Democratic voters in the past, Megan Gilbertson, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Office, wrote in an email to the AP.

A map displayed in the hallway of the county’s central tallying facility in downtown Phoenix shows direct voter turnout for the 2020 general election, Gilbertson wrote.

A photo Gilbertson provided to the AP, taken Monday, shows three maps in the hallways of the facility. Republican in-person voter turnout map, Democratic in-person voter turnout map, and in-person voter total voter turnout version. The blue Democratic map is right next to the red Republican map. The blue map corners appear in photos shared by people promoting false claims.

The map will be used to “make data-driven decisions about the best locations to have polling places in future elections,” she explained.

“The Maricopa County Records Department has a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team that creates all maps in-house,” added Gilbertson. “We use voter turnout data by party for elections such as presidential elections, which are party-only elections. For future planning for primaries and general elections, we use all-voter maps.”

Gilbertson said the map was created in late 2020 and hung in the hallway of the facility in January 2021. A similar in-person voter turnout map was created by him in 2019 while planning the 2020 presidential election.

One of the blogs that shared the false claim that the county only had Republican maps, then published an additional post admitting that it also had Democratic maps installed.

Finchem did not respond to AP’s request for comment.

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