2022 Election: Misinformation

[wing2000]

....thread to capture Misinformation events to capture misinformation....which has already started in Arizona:

What happened:
Tabulators at about 20 percent of the 223 voting locations in the county were experiencing problems, county officials told The Washington Post. Elections officials were fixing the problems . Ballots dropped in the slots are counted either at the end of the day, or in the coming days, at the county’s tabulation center in downtown Phoenix, said Megan Gilbertson, spokesperson for the county’s election department.

County officials stressed that no one was being prevented from voting and that no one’s ballot had been mishandled. They have said for weeks that ballot counting could take as many as 12 days.

Misinformation:
Critics of Arizona’s voting systems seized on the tabulation machine problems on Twitter and conservative social media sites, offering them as examples of a need to overhaul the state’s voting systems. One post included a video of a poll worker advising voters of their options and had already been viewed more than a half-million times. It was posted by Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of the political arm of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA. That group supports in-person voting at individual precincts on Election Day, and Bowyer has been critical of the state’s early-voting system.

Those preemptively suggesting something nefarious was occurring included Blake Masters, Arizona’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Masters, who is vying to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), was the most prominent candidate to amplify the suspicions, painting isolated incidents of mechanical errors as a Democratic ploy. “Hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse,” he wrote. “All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...updates-2022/#link-QNW7AUSZYZFDFMYIILC4DKJLUQ

 

[wing2000]

Re Maricopa County's tabulator issue:
[At polling sites, Maricopa County voters fill out paper ballots and then insert their ballots into on-site tabulators. The tabulators count the votes and save both the ballots and the results. ]

Maricopa County officials said technicians were trying to determine why ballot tabulators at about 20% of voting locations — about 40 of 223 voting centers — are experiencing problems.

"We have techs out there. We’re doing what we can to get them back online," said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates during an impromptu news conference Tuesday morning.

Gates said the issues were not centered in one particular geographical area but were "dispersed" throughout the state's most populous county.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said the county has not experienced this particular issue with tabulators in previous elections.

Election Day 2022 in Arizona: Live voting updates across the state

 

[wing2000]

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the influential Phoenix-based nonprofit aimed at engaging young conservatives, sent a Tweet to his 1.8 million followers calling for arrests related to election issues in Arizona’s most populous county.

“People need to be arrested for what is happening in Maricopa County,” Kirk wrote at about 12:15 p.m. on Election Day. “It’s criminal.”

Although the Tweet wasn’t specific about why Kirk thought arrests were warranted, it came amid a stream of Tweets about lines and machine glitches throughout metro Phoenix.

Kirk urged Republicans to vote in person, saying he did not trust the early voting mechanisms. He said that he expected the number of in-person voters to be “so immense they will not be able to do what they normally do, the kind of nonsense shenanigans.”

Election Day 2022 in Arizona: Live voting updates across the state

...

 

[essentialsaltes]

Maricopa County Elections Department
@MaricopaVote
·
2h

Maricopa County has identified the solution for the tabulation issues at about 60 Vote Centers. This solution has worked at 17 locations, and technicians deployed throughout the county are working to resolve this issue at the remaining locations.


[Even if they had all stayed broken, the worst that was going to happen was some delay in the counting.]

 

[wing2000]

The chief misinformer weighs in.....(of course there's no evidence Trump voters were the only voters affected)

4:10 p.m.: Trump urges Arizonans to stay in line
Former President Donald Trump posted a video message to Truth Social at 3 p.m. on Tuesday urging Arizona voters to stay in line at the polls, despite any issues with tabulators or long wait times.

Truth Social is social media platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group.

“To the great people of Arizona — Maricopa County, in particular — don’t leave your line. Stay where you are,” Trump said.

“They say that the machines aren’t working, they say that they’re running out of paper in different locations throughout different states,” Trump said. “There’s a lot of bad things going on. Stay on line, do not leave.”

“Already, a lot of people have left and it’s very, very unfair what’s going on. Maricopa County, don’t leave. Stay there.”

Election Day 2022 in Arizona: Live voting updates across the state

 

[wing2000]

Right-wing activist Steve Bannon, a former Trump administration official and promoter of election conspiracy theories, said voting machine mishaps on the Nov. 8 Election Day tainted Democrat Katie Hobbs’ victory over Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor who has refused to concede.

Hobbs “will never be considered legitimate,” said Bannon, who has been providing Lake counsel. "That's going to cripple her ability to govern. So that's why this is a crisis. There's a crisis for the entire state.”

In Arizona, election deniers refuse to back down

As Arizona counties face a Monday deadline to certify their midterm election results, Republican candidates and activists promoting false theories of voter fraud are refusing to back down.

www.reuters.com

 

[rambot]

Man. I SOOO surprised that it's Republicans in Arizona who are shouting misinformation. I just.....

 

[wing2000]

...expect to see

Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts writes:

Maricopa County on Sunday acknowledged printer problems in 43 of the county’s 223 voting centers on Election Day but said no voters were disenfranchised and no laws were broken.

“Every voter was provided a ballot by which he or she could record their votes, and all such ballots cast by lawful voters were tabulated, whether in the vote center or at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center,” deputy Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy, a lifelong Republican, wrote.

In its response to questions from the attorney general’s Elections Integrity Unit, the county addressed some of the MAGA team’s biggest complaints:

MAGA COMPLAINT: Republican voters were forced to wait in line for hours, with potentially tens of thousands leaving before they could vote.

IN FACT: The county says the average wait at the county’s 233 vote centers was 6 minutes. At 85% of the county’s vote centers, the longest wait was no more than 45 minutes. Seven vote centers did have wait times of up to 115 minutes, but the county's online posting system showed nearby voting centers with waits ranging from a minute to 25 minutes.

MAGA COMPLAINT: Because of printer problems, voters were told to put their ballots into a box, to be taken downtown to be counted, but nobody knows if those ballots were counted.

IN FACT: The county has long used secure ballot boxes to collect ballots that cannot be read by the tabulators. They are then taken downtown and counted.

This year, printers at 43 vote centers experienced problems on Election Day. Voters were advised by poll workers to deposit their ballots into those secure “Door 3” ballot boxes. Sadly, some voters, groomed for two years not to trust elections officials, declined to do so.

“Despite this being a legal, secure, and reliable voting option, many high profile and influential individuals instructed voters to not deposit their ballots in Door 3,” the county reported.

Individuals like state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who shortly after the polls opened warned, “DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN ‘BOX 3’ OR ‘DRAWER 3'."

And Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, who warned: “DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN BOX 3 TO BE ‘TABULATED DOWNTOWN’."

In the end, 16,724 voters opted to drop their ballots into the Door 3 box, either due to printer problems or because they used ballpoint pens the tabulators were unable to read rather than the markers provided at the vote centers.

The county says every one of those votes was counted.

MAGA COMPLAINT: Potentially thousands of voters left one polling place due to printer issues and went to another but were not allowed to vote.

IN FACT: The county reports that 206 voters checked in at one voting center then left to cast their ballots at a second location. Of those, 84 had properly checked out of the first voting center and were given standard ballots. The remaining 122 voters – the ones who didn’t check out of their first polling place – were given provisional ballots. Of those 122, 109 were checked, to ensure they hadn’t already voted, and then counted.

Bottom line: 193 of those 206 ballots counted.