A printing problem that affected some polling sites in Arizona’s largest county on Tuesday quickly became fodder for online conspiracy theories about Democrats intentionally hobbling the vote.
Republican candidates and social media users seized on the issues as evidence of election meddling in Maricopa County, even as election officials were fixing the snag in the afternoon and assured voters that every ballot would be counted.
More than 40,000 tweets about the printer failures spread in the span of two hours, according to the Stanford-affiliated Election Integrity Partnership, a group of some of the world’s top misinformation researchers. The group said attention surged after conservative commentator Charlie Kirk fueled unsupported claims that the issues were deliberate.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: Placing a ballot rejected by a tabulator into a drop box, sometimes known as “door 3” or “box 3,” resulted in the ballot getting shredded, thrown in the trash, or marked for Democrats.
THE FACTS: Ballots submitted in this way are counted in the same way as absentee ballots or mail-in ballots, according to county officials. They aren’t discarded or altered.
When machine issues stopped some voters at 60 of the county’s 223 vote centers from scanning their ballots into onsite tabulators on Tuesday, poll workers advised them they could drop their ballots into a secure drop box instead.
Ballots submitted this way would later be counted at the central tabulation center...
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