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 60 the county’s 223 voting centers. But in the afternoon, the county said it had isolated the problem: printers were not making dark enough markings on the ballots, and that it not a software problem.
Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, who are both Republicans, 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 Mr. 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 J. 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 on 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.
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor who has sown doubts about election integrity, sought to strike a balance on Tuesday between raising suspicion about Maricopa voting officials — and her Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs — and warning her own supporters away from being so discouraged as to fail to show up at polls.
“My message to the people in Arizona is do not get out of line until you’ve cast your vote,” Ms. Lake told reporters outside of a polling station on the downtown campus of Arizona State University. “Stay in line and vote, vote, vote — we’ve got to vote today.”
But Ms. Lake suggested, without providing evidence, that perhaps the problems were being caused, deliberately, by officials in Maricopa County.
“They may be trying to slow a red tsunami but it’s coming,” she said. With her election lawyer beside her, Ms. Lake said she had been planning to vote in a conservative precinct but instead came to a voting center in a left-leaning part of Phoenix.
“We switched from a Republican area to vote and came to the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines and guess what? They’ve had zero problems with their machines today.”
She added, “This is incompetency — I hope it’s not malice — but we’re going to fix this.”
Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.
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