CLAIM: Maricopa County, Arizona, announced that more than 540,000 voters visited vote centers on Election Day. It also announced that only 248,000 votes were cast on Election Day. Thus, the county “lost” about 292,000 votes.

AP Rating: Wrong. This skews the county data.announced by the prefecture More than 540,000 voters visited county vote centers on Election Day, including about 290,000 who dropped in their vote-by-mail ballots in person that day.identification. This figure also includes about 3,000 people who took provisional ballots. Instead of listing these as “Election Day” ballots in the final results, the county will put them in the “Early Vote” and “Provisional” categories.

Fact: As Arizona’s Largest County Official We met to authenticate the canvas for the 2022 election On Monday, social media users shared false claims about the county’s published election day voter turnout.

“Impossible: Did Maricopa County Lose 291,930 Votes in Election Day Polls?” Read the headline on a popular conservative website.

“Bombshell Report: Maricopa County announced that more than 540,000 voters visited one of the county’s 223 vote centers on Election Day, but the final count claimed that only 248,070 voted. official results data…” Read the tweet shared more than 8,000 times.

Referenced post document “More than 540,000 voters visited the site on Election Day, more election day voters than in every general election since 2008,” the county said. post It also cited a document from Maricopa County reporting the final election results. 248,070 “Election Day” votes counted.

But according to county elections office spokesperson Megan Gilbertson, those claims misrepresent the electorate count of 540,000. , approximately 290,000 voters who issued a vote-by-mail ballot and returned it in person on Election Day, and approximately 3,000 voters who cast a provisional ballot on Election Day. .

Combined, the 248,000 in-person ballots, 290,000 early ballots, and 3,000 provisional ballots that were cast on Election Day accounted for more than 540,000 people who visited vote centers across the county on Election Day.

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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. . Learn more about Fact Checking in AP.