Arizona voting issues not confined to conservative areas

CLAIM: Only voting sites in conservative areas in Arizona’s Maricopa County experienced issues with tabulating ballots on Election Day.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Voting centers across Maricopa County reported printing issues that stopped some ballots from being counted onsite, including in Democrat-leaning areas, like downtown Phoenix and Tempe, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department.

THE FACTS: As voting sites across Maricopa County reported issues with tabulating ballots due to a printing malfunction, former President Donald Trump, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and social media users suggested that the problems only affected sites in conservative parts of Maricopa County.

“We switched from a Republican area to vote, we came right down into the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines,” Lake said during a press gaggle on Tuesday. “And guess what? They’ve had zero problems with their machines today. Not one machine spit out a ballot here today, not one in a very liberal area.”

Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday in reference to the voting snag, “Only Republican areas? WOW!”

Such claims also spread independently on social media, with one Instagram user sharing an image Wednesday that featured the text, “Funny how in Arizona the voting machines ‘stopped working’ in predominantly REPUBLICAN areas.”

But that is not the case. Voting centers in both liberal and conservative parts of Maricopa County were impacted by the printing issues, according to a list of locations provided to The Associated Press by Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department.

Technicians were dispatched to the sites on the list to fix the printing issues, Gilbertson wrote in an email. Sites in Glendale, Phoenix, and Tempe, which all skew toward Democrats, were included on the list. One such site was in the Footprint Center, an arena in downtown Phoenix. Another was a voting location in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“It was spread all across the valley,” Gilbertson said. “At voting locations all across the valley.”

“It is simply untrue that the voting centers that were impacted are only in Republican areas,” said Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster based in Phoenix. “There are certainly some Republican areas impacted, but there are a significant number of Democratic-leaning areas that were impacted, as well as a number of swing areas or very competitive areas.”

Bentz added that several voting centers in the Sun City area, a Republican stronghold, didn’t show up on the list.

“It skews pretty evenly,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic strategist in Phoenix. “There’s a couple out in west Phoenix, Tolleson area, Maryvale, those are Democratic areas.”

Some tabulators did not read ballots submitted in-person Tuesday at voting sites in Maricopa County because the ballot printers did not produce what are known as “timing marks” that were dark enough to be detected by the machines, the AP reported. The marks tell ballot scanners voter information so choices can be tabulated.

Voters who had their ballots rejected were told they could try the location’s second tabulator, put it in a ballot box to be counted at the central facility later, or cancel it and go to another vote center. An estimated 70 out of 223 vote centers were affected, according to the county.

Ballots from about 17,000 voters were ultimately affected, out of about 1.56 million ballots cast. Those ballots were driven from the vote centers to the county’s central tabulation center and were being counted.

“The central count tabulators seem to be having no problems counting those Election Day ballots,” Gilbertson said Friday.

With Democrats maintaining narrow leads in key Arizona contests, Maricopa County election officials were expected to begin reporting results Friday from a crucial group of ballots, nearly 300,000 mail ballots that were returned on Election day.

The Lake campaign did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment.

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