Vicky Arias, FISM News
Irregularities at polling locations across the U.S. caused concern for voters and candidates during Tuesday’s midterm elections.
In Maricopa County, Arizona, the biggest and most populous county in the state, voting machines were unable to read ballots at nearly a quarter of the polling locations.
The issue started about an hour after polls opened in the morning and persisted throughout the day. By 3 p.m., the problem had been resolved at only 17 of the 60 affected locations.
Voters were given the choice to make their way to an unaffected polling location, cast their ballots into a dropbox for later counting, or wait at their current location for the machines to be fixed. Technicians, who eventually fixed the issue, determined that a formatting mark printed on the ballots hadn’t been printed dark enough for machine tabulators to read the votes.
Maricopa County, Arizona was home to much debate after the 2020 presidential election when Republicans contested the results there. In 2020, former President Donald Trump lost Arizona by a narrow margin of a little over 10,000 votes. In Maricopa County, President Joe Biden defeated Trump by roughly 45,000 votes, making Maricopa County “critical to his defeat of Trump,” according to Reuters. In 2016, Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in that same county by nearly 4 percentage points. As of 2022, Arizona Secretary of State data reflected that there are 34.67% registered Republican voters and 30.66% registered Democrats in the state.
Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, spoke out about the issues saying that there are “incompetent people running the show in Arizona … great patriots around [the] state show[ed] up today, it was so amazing, they showed up at the polls early this morning only to be told the election equipment didn’t work.”
Lake’s opponent is Arizona’s top election officer, Secretary of State, Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, pleaded for voters to stay in line.
“Stay in line until your vote is counted,” Masters tweeted on Tuesday morning, stating that it’s “hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse. All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.”
STAY IN LINE UNTIL YOUR VOTE IS COUNTED!
Hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse. All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.
STAY IN LINE UNTIL YOUR VOTE IS COUNTED!
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) November 8, 2022
Arizona wasn’t the only state experiencing problems at the polls. In Champaign County, Illinois, a cyberattack on county equipment affected the voting process as well.
According to ABC7 News’s Chuck Goudie, “a cyberattack on the county’s network and servers from an unidentified source … was aimed at undermining and destabilizing the democratic process. While [officials claim] no data or votes were compromised, the process was slowed until authorities said it was resolved in the afternoon.”
The attacks affected the connectivity of the county’s servers. ABC reported that “the [Champaign County] Clerk’s office encouraged voters to stay in line as election workers process[ed] voters ‘while navigating [the] attacks.’”
Located roughly 135 miles south of Chicago, Champaign County includes rural Republican precincts as well as the Democrat-leaning college town of Champaign, Illinois, home to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
In Pennsylvania, polls in parts of Luzerne County reportedly ran out of paper for ballots. Voters expressed frustration to ABC16 News.
“[It] seems very odd that there’s a few places around here that [have] no paper … when it’s Election Day,” Pennsylvania voter Brad Spaide said, going to state that “people [are] working second or third shift, and they can’t get back to vote … their time is usually in the morning. Well, now they can’t cast their ballot.”
Luzerne County, according to Politico, “in 2016 … was one of three Pennsylvania counties to support Donald Trump after backing Barack Obama in his two presidential elections [and] it was the only one of those counties to support Trump in 2020, though by a smaller margin.”