Reports of dozens of malfunctioning ballot-counting machines in Maricopa County in Arizona prompted a surge of voter fraud claims across right-wing media Tuesday in a sign that election doubts and conspiracy theories would continue to find traction on Election Day.
Maricopa officials said the problems with ballot tabulation machines, including the rejection of valid ballots or their failure to read ballots successfully, were affecting about 40 the county’s 223 voting centers.
Bill Gates, chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, said the problems were disappointing but that voters could still cast ballots and that nobody was being denied a vote.
“None of this indicates any fraud,” said Gates, who is a Republican. “This is a technical issue.”
But claims of widespread voter fraud circulated quickly on social media and in right-wing media anyway, with several right-wing commentators and politicians arguing that problems at voting sites would disproportionately affect Republicans, who have generally preferred voting in person because of distrust of mail-in ballots.
“Can this possibly be true when a vast majority of Republicans waited for today to Vote?” former President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social about the issues in Arizona. “Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!”
The chair of the state Republican Party, Kelli Ward, immediately raised the possibility of “malfeasance” and recalling officials.
About six in 10 Arizona voters reside in Maricopa County, which has tilted increasingly toward Democrats since 2016. Several Republican election deniers are running in competitive races in Tuesday’s election.
The Election Integrity Project, a coalition of online information researchers, found more than 40,000 messages on Twitter about the issue before noon Tuesday, with a large spike after a video was shared by Charlie Kirk, a conservative radio host who later said that people “need to be arrested for what is happening in Maricopa County.”
The video shows a poll worker outside a polling station telling voters that two ballot tabulators were malfunctioning. The worker tells voters that if their ballot is rejected, they can have the ballot read manually or in a tabulator later.
“No one’s trying to deceive anybody,” the poll worker says.
“No, not on Election Day. No, that would never happen,” the person recording the video replies in a sarcastic tone.
During a news conference Tuesday, Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor who has sown doubts about election integrity, suggested that the problems could be an effort to suppress Republican votes — claiming, without evidence, that voting machines in left-leaning parts of Phoenix did not experience issues.
“This is incompetency. I hope it’s not malice,” Lake said. She added, “They may be trying to slow a red tsunami, but it’s coming.”
Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, has been a target of conspiracy theories since the 2020 presidential election, when more than 150 Republicans swarmed a vote-counting site festooned with Trump flags and asserted that the county was committing fraud.
Maricopa election officials have worked in the years since to dispel concerns about ballot issues in the county, weathering a bruising primary season that reignited conspiracy theories directed at officials and its election process.
“If you’re at a polling place experiencing an issue with a tabulator, you have three options & your vote will be counted in each,” Gates posted on Twitter on Tuesday, receiving fewer than 200 likes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .