All votes counted in Maricopa County, despite online claims

CLAIM: Uncounted ballots that got mixed with counted ballots at voting sites in Arizona’s Maricopa County were not included in the final midterm election results.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While such ballots were mixed at two separate voting centers on Election Day, they were properly vetted and accurately tabulated, according to Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department.

THE FACTS: During November’s midterm elections, a printing malfunction caused tabulation machines at dozens of voting sites in Maricopa County to reject ballots on Election Day.

Poll workers advised voters whose ballots were rejected to put them in a secure drop box referred to as “door 3” or “box 3” to be counted later at the county’s central tabulation facility. And while poll workers were trained to keep such yet-to-be-counted votes separate from those tabulated on-site, the ballots were “returned together,” Gilbertson wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

As the state certified its results this week, posts continued to circulate on social media falsely claiming that those ballots were never counted in the final results, with users citing a video of a self-described poll observer speaking at a Nov. 28 Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting. The woman in the video said that such ballots were combined at her voting site located “off of Camelback and 7th street.”

“They commingled the un-tabulated ballots of drawer 3 with the tabulated ballots,” the woman says in the clip, referring to box 3. “There is no way to ever sort that and track that. Those are lost votes. Those are lost voices.” One Instagram post sharing the video was liked more than 19,000 times.

But, as the county explained in the days after the election, there is a way to sort and track such ballots, and the votes were counted in the final results. Additionally, such ballot mixing only occurred at two voting locations: Desert Hills Community Church in North Phoenix and the Church of Jesus Christ of LDS in Gilbert, according to Gilbertson. There is no record of such ballot mixing occurring at other voting centers, and the county never received a report of the issue occurring at the voting site described by the woman, Gilbertson told the AP by phone on Wednesday.

“Only two sites encountered that issue,” Gilbertson said.

An attempt to reach the woman who made the claim during the Nov. 28 meeting for comment was unsuccessful.

The affected ballots were isolated and audited to make sure no votes were missed or double counted, Gilbertson wrote in an email this week. That process, called audit reconciliation, involves checking that the total number of ballots from a given vote center matches with the number of voters who checked-in at the site. Observers from both political parties were present. All Election Day ballots are required to undergo the process.

“We have redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once,” Gilbertson wrote. “This process ensures that no ballot was double counted and that all ballots cast at the Vote Center were counted.”

“All Election Day ballots cast at those two locations were counted and reported in the final results,” she added.

In a November report responding to questions from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Elections Department similarly asserted it “retabulated the entire batch of ballots” from the two affected voting centers to ensure the accuracy of the count.

Gilbertson said in the days after the election that similar mistakes have been made before, and the process to address it has been in place for decades, the AP reported.

“Every single polling location in Maricopa County has a reconciliation audit that’s completed for every single election,” said Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the county election department. “It’s been that way literally for 30 years or more.”

Patrick said it is not uncommon for Maricopa County to process door 3 ballots and that every election that she was involved with for the county featured door 3 ballots.

The AP has previously reported on similarfalse claims surrounding the 2022 midterm election in Arizona, including that the door 3 ballots were thrown away or marked for Democratic candidates.

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