Problems with dozens of electronic ballot counters in the US state of Arizona on Tuesday were used by former Republican President Donald Trump and his supporters, who falsely claimed it was evidence of election fraud perpetrated by Democrats.
Just hours after Election Day began, Maricopa County Registrar Stephen Richer told reporters that about 20 percent of electronic ballot counters in the state’s most populous county were malfunctioning and technicians were sent to repair them.
Saying that the problem is that the ballot papers are not lined up and read correctly inside the machines, Richer added that despite the problems, all the votes will be counted.
Richer called the collapses “frustrating” and correctly predicted that election deniers and conspirators like Trump would “exploit” the problem.
Maricopa County officials said the issue affected about 60 machines in a quarter of the polls in Maricopa County, and was fixed by changing the printer settings on 17 of them by 2pm — 8 hours later — after voting began.
Reiterating Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Republican state governor candidate Kari Lake also took advantage of the machine’s problems by posting a “voter alert” on her Twitter account.
Lake later told reporters that he had no problem voting in what he described as a left-wing area of the city.
“We were right to vote in a liberal space,” he said. “They need to fix this problem.”
Trump, Lake and other electoral deniers are calling for an end to electronic voting machines, for voting only on election day, and the use of paper ballots and manual counting only; this process is time consuming, expensive and far less accurate than vote counting. machine.
Biden narrowly won Arizona by 12,000 votes in 2020. The state has been at the center of unfounded allegations by Trump and his followers that the presidential election two years ago was held against him. All of Arizona’s top Republican candidates this year are election deniers, including Lake.
source: Noticias
