As the last elections still ways heavily on many minds the elections polls in Maricopa County are being scrutinized by the media. Especially now as Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates has already reported that approximately 20% of the voting centers in Arizona’s largest county were experiencing issues. The main concern was with the vote-counting tabulators.
“About 20% of the locations out there where there’s an issue with the tabulator where some of the ballots that after people have voted them, they try and run them through the tabulator and they’re not going through,” Gates stated.
Poll worker in Maricopa County confirms "nothing's working" for the last half hour. Explains misread ballots will get counted downtown tonight. pic.twitter.com/DO6BxhV7Vq
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 8, 2022
Gates claimed that if the tabulator does not accept a ballot, voters can place their ballots inside a “secure box.” The ballots in those boxes were manually counted during the evening at a central counting location. Gates reassured the public by confirming that the majority of Arizona counties tabulate ballots this way.
“This will function much like early voting functions, in that we would get your ballot back, once we’ve signature-verified it, we would send it to our central tabulators,” Gates explained. “Ballots that are [at the central location] will already be signature-verified, so we won’t need to confirm identity but we will central-tabulate them.”
BREAKING: Reports out of Maricopa county of Machines “not working” and ballots being “misread”
WHAT IS GOING ON?
pic.twitter.com/lkd0YXegXZ— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 8, 2022
Social media exploded with an uproar of Maricopa County Voters reporting about the tabulator malfunctions at multiple locations. Videos of election workers announcing issues with the vote-counting machines flooded Twitter.
“We have two tabulators. One of the tabulators is not working,” an election worker in one video explained. “The other tabulator is taking about 75% successful. So, 25% of them are being misread. And it could be a printer issue, or it could be the tabulator itself. So, when it’s misread, you have an option to put it into what’s called box three, and it gets read. Whether it goes downtown and gets read manually or whether it gets refed into our tabulator.”
Another video shared captured an election worker explaining how ballots placed into box three will be counted.
“Tonight, a Republican and a Democrat will sit and go through all of the misread ballots all over the county and count them,” the election worker explained. She added that none of the tabulators at the voting location were working correctly.
“Nothing’s working for the last half hour,” she added.
