Voting machine issues in Arizona seized on by Trump, election deniers By Reuters

By Tim Reid

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Issues with dozens of digital vote-counting machines within the battleground state of Arizona on Tuesday had been seized upon by Republican former President Donald Trump and his followers, who falsely claimed it was proof of election fraud by Democrats.

Only a few hours into Election Day, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer instructed reporters that about 20% of digital vote tabulation machines within the state’s most populous county had been malfunctioning, and technicians had been being deployed to repair them.

The issue was that ballots weren’t lining up correctly contained in the machines and weren’t being learn, Richer mentioned, including that regardless of the issues all votes could be counted. Richer referred to as the malfunctions “disappointing” and accurately predicted that election deniers and conspiracists corresponding to Trump would “exploit” the difficulty.

Maricopa County officers mentioned the issue affected about 60 machines at 1 / 4 of voting places in Maricopa County, and that by 2 p.m. – 8 hours after voting began – 17 had been mounted by altering the printer settings.

The state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, additionally seized on the machine issues, issuing a “voter alert” on her Twitter account. Lake has echoed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him via widespread voting fraud.

About three hours earlier than polls had been resulting from shut in Arizona, Lake, Blake Masters, the state’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate, and the Republican Nationwide Committee filed an emergency lawsuit. They requested a decide to increase voting hours in Maricopa County by one other three hours, till 10 p.m., due to the tabulation machine malfunctions, and to delay the discharge of early poll counts by these machines till 11 p.m.

Trump posted a video to his Fact Social platform urging individuals in Arizona to “keep on line” in the event that they had been going through delays in voting.

Lake instructed reporters that she had encountered no points when she voted in what she described as a left-leaning space of town.

Trump, Lake and different election deniers have been calling for the top of digital voting machines, Election Day-only voting and the usage of simply paper ballots and hand counts, a course of that’s time-consuming, pricey and much much less correct than machine counting.

Democrat Joe Biden narrowly beat Trump in Arizona in 2020. The state has been central within the false claims by Trump and his followers that the presidential election was rigged towards him. All of Arizona’s predominant Republican candidates this 12 months are election deniers, together with Lake.

“Stories are coming in from Arizona that the Voting Machines should not correctly working in predominately Republican/Conservative areas,” Trump mentioned in a submit on Fact Social, including: “Right here we go once more? The individuals won’t stand for it!!”

Barbara Russell, 70, a volunteer Republican ballot observer at a voting location in Wickenburg, a city in rural Maricopa County, instructed Reuters that each tabulation machines there had been malfunctioning and rejecting ballots.

“That is the full disenfranchisement of rural voters,” Russell instructed Reuters.

Paul Penzone, the Maricopa County Sheriff, mentioned further deputies had been deployed to polling places. Barricades had been erected across the county’s elections workplace in central Phoenix in anticipation of potential protests.