Claim: Video shows Maricopa County officials sabotaging voting machines
Instagram post on May 28 (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot. true social post From former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The post contains clips of people touching and moving voting machines.
“We caught them,” said Lake’s post. “This is video evidence from Maricopa County’s own livestream – they didn’t know we were recording – showing personnel entering the machine after it has been inspected and sealed. They will reprogram memory cards just before Election Day and disable polling stations in 60% of Republican areas.This is sabotage!”
The Instagram post received over 700 likes within a week, and the Truth Social post received over 12,000 likes.Hundreds of similar posts Interaction on Instagram. a Gateway Critic Article Similar claims garnered more than 2,000 shares on Facebook, according to social media insight tool CrowdTangle.
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Our Rating: False
The video shows election workers inserting new memory cards into the tally machine as part of standard procedure, said a Maricopa County elections spokeswoman. Workers reset the machine and found that the memory card did not store the votes. This process does not prove sabotage. Some polling place printers were affected by glitches on Election Day, but the glitches were unrelated to this process.
Maricopa County election officials did not interfere with the tally machine
A Republican, Lake ran for governor of Arizona in 2022, but lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by about three margins. 17,000 votes. Since then, she has made numerous unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud.
According to the report, Lake’s allegations of sabotage are “clearly false.” Matthew Roberts Communications manager for the Maricopa County Elections Authority. The county also debunked this claim. twitter.
Roberts said a clip in Lake’s post dated Oct. 14, 2022, shows the installation of a new memory card in a tally machine that takes place after each election. The process took place under live-stream video cameras at the county vote counting center.
and Court filing on 10 May, Maricopa County said it tallied a small number of ballots at each tally machine to ensure that the memory cards were inserted correctly when they were inserted. According to the filing, the process does not prove wrongdoing.
Roberts said that after running test polls, tallies are reset to ensure that no votes have been saved to the memory card.
“The tallies are then tamper-proof sealed and ready for delivery to each Vote Center, where a polling official verifies that no ballots have been recorded on the tally and all We confirm that the result of is zero,” Roberts said.
Fact check: An Arizona Judge May 22 Denied Kari Lake’s Recent Election Challenge
According to the Maricopa County Elections Office, the memory card has been validated by statutory inspection, and the county has verified that the ballot counting device is programmed correctly and the ballots are being counted accurately. said. website.
Tammy Patrick An election expert who served as a federal compliance officer for the Maricopa County Elections Service for 11 years also told USA TODAY that he sees no evidence of fraud in the video.
“For more than a decade in Arizona, almost two years, tally centers have been live during the ballot processing,” Patrick said. “Transparency in this process comes at a cost when there are actors willing to take things out of context to support the narrative they want to promote, for their own benefit. Maricopa County Voters Please trust the legitimacy of their elections and that this process is transparent and has been observed and verified by representatives of the parties present.”
Mr. Lake’s claim that 60% of polling places in Republican areas have stopped working is also inaccurate on several counts.
The Republic of Arizona reported that printers in 70 of the 223 polling places in Maricopa County produced format marks on some ballots that were too faint to be read by tally machines. However, an independent investigation found the issue was not related to fraud, and Roberts said the issue was “intermittent.”
“If precinct counters could not read ballots, ballots were inserted into secure ballot boxes and counted at ballot counting centers,” Roberts said. “The problem was ‘dispersed’ and not concentrated in any particular area. Previous reports have clearly shown that it was incorrect to say that polling stations were affected only in Republican areas. It is done.”
a Washington Post analysis According to the survey, the percentage of registered Republicans in the affected precincts was approximately 37%, about the same as the percentage of registered Republicans in the county as a whole.
USA TODAY reached out to Lake and the social media users who shared the allegations for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
lead story also proved to be wrong Claim.
Our fact check sources:
- Tammy PatrickMay 31, telephone interview with USA TODAY
- Matthew Roberts, email exchange with USA TODAY, May 30
- Maricopa County, May 30 Tweet
- Maricopa County Elections Accessed May 31 election facts
- Arizona Superior Court in and for Maricopa County, May 10 Maricopa County Defendants Reaction to Lake’s Motion for Relief from Sentence
- Washington Post, 13 November 2022, Arizona constituencies with voting problems aren’t overwhelmingly Republican
- ARIZONA REPUBLIC, April 10, Maricopa County Election Day Printer Issue Not Linked to Fraud, Independent Review Announces
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