A glitch in Maricopa is a gift for election deniers

CNN
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Not much can grow naturally in the barren desert landscape of Arizona’s Maricopa County, but given its pivotal role in shaping national politics, it’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root.

“We’ve anticipated legitimate mistakes and issues with election infrastructure being reframed as fraud,” Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of disinformation, explained to CNN.

This is what appears to have happened in Maricopa County on Election Day.

The right-wing personalities, who have spent the past two years convincing millions of Americans not to trust their democracy, pointed to this Election Day’s problem with printers at some Maricopa polling locations as proof that everything they had said was right. The printer issue was not a mistake, they suggested – fraud was afoot.

There will be issues at the polls on any Election Day in the United States. You can argue about whether this is acceptable or expected, or the result of incompetence and aging infrastructure. But it is another thing entirely to suggest, without evidence, that these issues are the result of a nefarious and sophisticated effort to “steal” an election.

2020 election deniers claimed malice to the everyday, repeatedly claiming that videos showed poll workers stealing votes, when in fact, the videos showed them doing what they were supposed to. Having studied this, Starbird and her colleagues at the University of Washington and the Stanford Internet Observatory published a report last month looking at “implied intentionality.”

“In elections, honest human errors can be opportunistically exploited to imply intentionality and to support unfounded narratives of intentional, widespread fraud, undermining the legitimacy of electoral outcomes. However, as research shows, election fraud is exceedingly rare and such mistakes are unlikely to impact election outcomes,” they wrote.

It all started early in the Election Day, when a Republican activist posted a Twitter video showing a Maricopa worker explaining that there was a problem which could lead to delays.

For those who waited to claim the election was fraud, it was a gift that could hardly have come from a better source.

Maricopa, Arizona’s most populous county, became the center of the election conspiracy theory universe after then-President Donald Trump lost the state in 2020. Republicans called for votes to be audited and audited again, even eventually bringing in the infamous “Cyber Ninjas” – they also concluded Joe Biden had won there.

Maricopa election officials assured that no one would be stopped from voting after the video started to spread on social media. Instead of having to insert their ballots into a machine or put them in a secure box, voters were instructed. A Maricopa County judge was asked to rule on Tuesday evening. He said that there was no evidence to suggest that anyone who wanted the right to vote was not capable.

Naturally, to those who didn’t want to hear it, those facts fell on deaf ears.

Researchers at the University of Washington have gathered data showed that discussion of the tabulator problem began to gather major traction after Republican activist Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, shared the video on their social media accounts.

Despite neither party claiming outright that the video was evidence fraud, their followers and many others who had heard so many false accusations of a stolen 2020 election were quick to jump on that conclusion.

Trump sent a flurry of messages about the issue on Truth Social, starting with a 2 p.m. post, stating, “Maricopa County in Arizona looks like a complete Voter Integrity DISASTER.” In other posts he suggested, without evidence, that only “Republican areas” were impacted.

“There is no partisan bias in what happened,” Bill Gates the Chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors said Tuesday night, pointing out that the board was controlled by Republicans and the Maricopa County Recorder is a Republican. Gates is himself a Republican.

It was not an accident that this video went viral so quickly. This too was artificially grown, as is the case with many other Maricopa County plants.

Election deniers had spent many long months encouraging people go to polling stations to look for fraud. This is exactly what they wanted to see, despite the fact that it shows no fraud.

This country has suffered from baseless lies about elections. They’ve convinced a third of Americans that Biden wasn’t legitimately elected president. They’ve prompted violent threats to election officials and their families, in turn leading many officials to quit. They also led to an attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The lies of Election Day 2022 are already taking root in the darker corners of the internet – on the very same forums used by people who previously committed violence, including attacking the Capitol .

Responding to a post about the alleged fraud in Maricopa on Tuesday, one anonymous user on a pro-Trump forum wrote, “We are way past prison at this point.” Another asked, “How about execution?”