Arizona Republicans are seizing on technical problems with ballot tabulation machines in the state’s largest county to make unsubstantiated claims about the validity of Tuesday’s elections, signaling a contentious aftermath of the 2022 midterms.
In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, elections officials flagged problems with ballot tabulators in about 20% of the county’s polling locations but made clear that it would not affect voters’ ability to cast a ballot.
Overall, elections watchers say there have been a few scattered problems nationally, including snafus involving voting machines in Mercer County, New Jersey; laptops used to verify voter registrations in Fort Bend County, Texas; and isolated complaints about overzealous poll observers, typical for an election in a country with more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions.
“Things are actually pretty quiet,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Lab.
The problem with Maricopa County ballot tabulators has already become a flashpoint, however, because the state was ground zero for former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in 2020. It is the only battleground state where all four major statewide candidates are election deniers and already drew national attention when activists wearing tactical gear and armed with handguns showed up to watch over ballot drop boxes.
The state’s Republican Party chair and candidates for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate shared similar messages on social media on Tuesday, calling on voters to stay at polling places until ballot tabulators are fixed. The messaging echoed conspiracy theories about “box 3,” which spread rapidly online Tuesday.
Senate candidate Blake Masters, who ran a campaign ad saying Trump won in 2020, tweeted that the problem was “incompetence or something worse.” Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, who was outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack, blamed incumbent Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, for the problem and called on supporters to “not let them take your vote away.”
State Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward, who was part of a fake elector scheme for Trump in 2020, told former Trump aide Steve Bannon on an online show that the problem was “not just incompetence; it’s malfeasance.”
Hobbs did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
By the afternoon, the Maricopa County elections board said that technicians resolved the issue at 17 polling places after changing settings on the printers that produce the ballots, noting in a statement that “it appears some of the printers were not producing dark enough timing marks on the ballots.”
In the first election since Trump’s “stop the steal” movement began with his defeat to President Joe Biden, as many as 600 machines made by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems Inc. also weren’t operating throughout Mercer County, New Jersey, which includes the state capitol of Trenton and Princeton University. Other problems were reported in Houston.
A senior official at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Tuesday afternoon that it was normal to see “a few issues” such as the problems associated with election tabulators in Maricopa County but that they “should not affect anyone’s ability to cast a ballot.”
“None of this is out of the ordinary, and it’s really important that we all work not to make the normal out to be nefarious,” the official said.
An early analysis by Bloomberg News of social media platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Truth Social and Tumblr— shows that as the day progressed an initial wave of posts drawing attention to the problems have slowly given way to more explicit conspiracy theories by various pro-Trump groups.
At the core of the online complaints is the so-called “box 3,” where voters whose ballots cannot be tabulated immediately can put them. The county elections office said in a statement that voters having trouble with the tabulator can “insert their ballot in the secure slot on the ballot box where it will be counted at the Tabulation and Election Center.”
Those ballots were to be centrally tabulated later in the evening, officials said, similar to how the county handles early voting — but without the need to further confirm identification, because ballots dropped at polling places Tuesday are already effectively signature-verified, officials said.
“Technical staff are working to resolve an issue with tabulators and investigating the cause,” the statement said.
Bannon, recently sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the Capitol attack, described Arizona as “ground zero” on "War Room," his online video channel. He accused Maricopa County was putting out “inaccurate” information.
Finchem retweeted the clip from Bannon’s show.
Ward also called for the resignation of senior county election officials, arguing they should have nothing to do with the 2024 election, and advised voters to go to a different polling location.
Other problems were scattered around the country.
In New Jersey, people were casting ballots manually, and officials warned of delays in counting.
“We have Dominion and other IT professionals coming down to fix the problem,” County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello said in an email. “All votes will be counted tonight by the Mercer County Board of Elections by their scanners. Results may be delayed.”
A Dominion official said the issue appeared to be with Mercer County’s printed ballots.
The company was the subject of baseless claims of widespread election rigging in the 2020 presidential contest. It is involved in ongoing defamation lawsuits against outlets including Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network, as well as Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
About a dozen polling stations in Houston’s largest suburban county experienced voting delays after some voter-verification laptops malfunctioned because of a synchronization error related to this past weekend’s time change, according to John Oldham, the county’s elections administrator.
