Black ballot bags a normal part of Arizona county’s vote count

CLAIM: Images show black bags full of ballots being deposited at a tabulation center in Arizona’s Maricopa County in order to manipulate vote totals.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. These black bags are used to carry counted ballots, but the image doesn’t show them being used fraudulently. The bags are brought into the tabulation center during audits to confirm that initial vote totals accurately reflect the number of ballots cast. These audits are a normal part of the vote-counting process in Maricopa County, a county spokesperson and former county elections official confirmed, and do not suggest an effort to inflate one candidate’s votes.

THE FACTS: In the days since Democrat Katie Hobbs prevailed over Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s closely-watched gubernatorial contest, online scrutiny has increasingly focused on populous Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs.

Social media users have suggested that officials are trying to manipulate vote totals, pointing to images of poll workers carrying the bags. The images are similar in format and camera angle to the livestreamed webcam feeds from the Maricopa County tabulation center.

“In Maricopa County black bags are everywhere. I bet majority of those black bags contained ballots in favor of Katie Hobbs,” remarked one Twitter user on Monday.

“Nothing to see here, just Democrats with the help of the media and GOP establishment stealing another election,” wrote one user on Instagram Tuesday.

But the images don’t show anything untoward. On the contrary, they show the county applying an extra level of scrutiny to some batches of ballots.

The black bags in the images are used for transporting a specific cohort of ballots: only those cast at one of the state’s vote centers in person on Election Day, according to Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for Maricopa County’s election department. These ballots are counted via a tabulation machine at the vote center, then sealed in the black bags and sent to storage, she explained.

Early ballots, whether cast in-person or absentee, are sent directly to a larger tabulation center for counting, and thus do not go in the black bags.

While the black bags typically remain in storage after the election, the image being shared online shows them being brought to the tabulation center as part of a process called a reconciliation audit. This audit checks the number of voters who signed in to cast a ballot at a vote center against the actual number of ballots in the bags.

Reconciliation audits take place with every election, Patrick said. Most voting centers’ audits proceed quickly, without necessitating the removal of ballots from storage, but some locations during the 2022 midterms experienced difficulties.

At two centers, for example, uncounted ballots that had been rejected by tabulation machines due to a printing error were mixed in with some already-counted ballots. Such a situation would “absolutely” warrant a double-check of those voting centers’ totals using the ballots in the black bags, Patrick said.

The Maricopa County Elections Department tweeted a photo last week of workers bringing out black bags during one such audit.

Megan Gilbertson, county elections department spokesperson, echoed Patrick’s explanation. “It is a normal process to do reconciliation of Election Day (vote center) check-ins against the ballot counts,” she said. Gilbertson specified that the bags are only unsealed in view of partisan observers and livestreamed webcams, and a chain of custody is documented throughout.

The county laid out the process in a tongue-in-cheek Twitter thread on Friday, describing poll workers “CAUGHT IN THE ACT following the law.” The thread noted the bags “have a tamper evident seal for security, are logged on a chain of custody form,” and are returned to the county by two poll workers “of differing parties.”

Maricopa County officials have battled false fraud accusations and conspiracy theories throughout the election, as the AP has previously detailed. Arizona isslower to count its votes than some other states, but experts say that’s not cause for alarm.

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Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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