Jason Easley reports, Kari Lake And The GOP Are Spreading Lies And Misinformation About Maricopa County Voting:
Maricopa County, Arizona, is having some issues with ballot tabulation with 20% of the ballots, but Republicans, like Kari Lake, are spreading misinformation.
Lake tweeted:
I am getting flooded with calls and text messages from people who are having trouble voting all over Maricopa County.
THIS is why we must reform our elections. https://t.co/oFFElskQFs
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 8, 2022
Here is the real story from Votebeat Arizona:
The machines that tabulate ballots at Maricopa County vote centers are having widespread issues, with about 20% of locations affected.
The affected vote-counting machines are rejecting about one ballot out of every five ballots inserted, Maricopa County Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates said at a news conference on Election Day, about three hours after polls opened.
As per county. In some locations, the tabulators are rejecting ballots. There are no indications of miscounting. In locations where this is happening they are transporting the ballots to central count to be tabulated on the much larger ICX machines. https://t.co/XbmqN2CBy7
— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) November 8, 2022
Officials do not know yet what is causing the problem, but they are offering voters other secure options while they work to determine it. In an attempt to get ahead of conspiracy theories, Gates said that “none of this indicates any fraud or anything of that sort” and assured the public that ballots cast at affected locations would be properly counted.
“Everyone is still getting to vote,” Gates said. “No one is being disenfranchised. And we have redundancies in place.”
The actual story of what is going on in Maricopa County sounds much different than what Lake and Charlie Kirk suggested.
Maricopa County, AZ seeing the first significant round of election misinfo this morning with rightwing influencers misrepresenting a tabulators issue as evidence of fraud. There are like ~20 people who control the (dis)info we see and it's only going to get worse as the day goes. https://t.co/660SpJx6LO
— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) November 8, 2022
Maybe it wasn’t such a brilliant idea for Republicans to wait until the last minute and vote in person.
Technical problems happen in every high-turnout election, but in the age of Trump’s big lie, everything in right-wing eyes is evidence of fraud or a stolen election.
People are getting to vote. Votes are still being counted, but Lake and her supporters are laying the groundwork for a false claim that the Arizona gubernatorial election was stolen from her.
Get ready for a Maricopa County Big Lie.
UPDATE:
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Time magazine reports, “Problems With Some Arizona Voting Machines Are Already Stoking Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories”, https://time.com/6230714/arizona-voting-machines-conspiracy-theories/
Election officials in Arizona’s largest county spent the first few hours of Election Day scrambling to reassure the public and push back against false claims after problems emerged with vote counting machines at some polling sites.
As of Tuesday afternoon, technicians in Maricopa County were working to determine why ballot tabulators at roughly 40 of 223 locations—20% of voting centers—were experiencing problems. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer acted quickly, posting a video on social media two hours after the polls opened. They walked people through the issue with the tabulator machines, demonstrating how their ballot might not go through. They reassured voters that they had a backup plan in place, showing how to place the ballot in the secure lock box attached to the machine, which would be taken to a central counting location on Tuesday evening.
“This is actually what the majority of Arizona counties do on Election Day all the time,” Gates said. “And if you would prefer to go to another location, you can do that—doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you’re a registered voter here in Maricopa County.”
Here is a message from Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer with an update for @maricopacounty voters on Elections Day. pic.twitter.com/OkQczCklGb
— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) November 8, 2022
Maricopa County—which is home to nearly 4.6 million people, and about 6 out of 10 Arizona voters—operates on a voting center system, meaning anyone registered to vote in the county can vote at any location.
But the issue was quickly seized by right-wing politicians and pundits as evidence of widespread voter fraud conspiracies, exploding on Twitter as well as far-right Telegram channels and online message boards. More than 40,000 tweets had spread misinformation about the voting machine issue in Maricopa within two hours, according to the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of research organizations focused on elections.
“There is high likelihood that these narratives around machine malfunctions will gain traction in other states, as audiences and influencers become primed to search for and amplify similar stories elsewhere,” the group said. The video posted by local election officials had only been shared 1,100 times.
“Every f— one in that office needs to be fired, investigated and thrown in prison for this s—,” one person posted on a forum for supporters of former President Donald Trump amplifying election conspiracies with the headline “Here we go again.”
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has promoted Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, also quickly jumped on the development. “I am getting flooded with calls and text messages from people who are having trouble voting all over Maricopa County,” she tweeted Tuesday morning, sharing a video posted by conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Trump himself weighed in shortly after, repeating the false claims on Truth Social and posting “Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!”
After the 2020 election Arizona became ground-zero for election conspiracies, and Tuesday’s reports of malfunctioning machines are likely to fuel even more false claims. Rep. Paul Gosar blamed the state’s top election official, Lake’s opponent, Democrate Katie Hobbs, saying the “legitimate integrity concerns” were “directly related to [her] incompetence.” Lake and other Republicans had called on Hobbs to recuse herself from overseeing the election because she was a candidate for governor. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon alleged during a livestream Tuesday morning that the machine issues are a deliberate effort to suppress Republican votes: “They’re doing it on purpose.” His guest, conservative activist Ben Bergquam, responded “The only way they can win is if they cheat.”
Ahead of the midterm elections, right-wing groups pushing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen recruited tens of thousands of Americans to serve as poll watchers across the country. Analysts and experts have warned that is likely to lead to more disinformation, the further harassment of election workers and deepening distrust in the country’s elections. “When you come in with a conspiratorial mindset, and not a lot of knowledge about how things work, it’s very easy to misconstrue what’s going on and to act in bad faith,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, told TIME in October. “Some of the people who are coming in have been manipulated into believing things are not on the up and up, and they may—deliberately or inadvertently—further undermine people’s confidence in the process through misunderstanding of the system.”
It’s been the plan for a few years now, flood the zone with shit is how Bannon puts it.
No matter what happens today, we can’t do what Dems did after Obama’s first win and all go home. It’s going to be an ugly few months, then an ugly few years…
Until their cult leader moves on to that bankrupt Jersey casino in the sky, this is the world we live in.