Voting had only been underway in the US for a few hours and polls still hadn’t even opened in some parts of the country, but Republican strategist and pro-Trump influencer Joey Mannarino had apparently seen enough.
“MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF VOTER FRAUD BEING REPORTED ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!” Mannarino asserted on X at 9:02 am EST, offering no evidence to support his declaration. “The Democrats are stealing our country right out from under us!”
As in any other election year, as polling places opened, people began showing up to vote, and voting machines started whirring into action, some jurisdictions ran into problems.
Severe flooding along Florida’s Space Coast meant about 20 polling places had to be moved. Bad storms over the weekend likely caused brief power outages in Arizona’s Maricopa County, forcing the temporary closure of several polling places. Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County was missing a scanner box. And in Westchester County, New York, voting in the hotly contested House race between incumbent Republican representative Mike Lawler and Democrat Cait Conley hit a roadblock early on Tuesday morning when machines stopped accepting paper ballots.
Voting machine malfunctions—much like bad weather and power outages—are fairly common during elections. While typically attributable to some mundane problem like ageing components, these malfunctions are often the source of rumors or conspiracy theories.
And like other election years in recent memory, there’s a network of MAGA influencers, Republican lawmakers, pro-Trump trolls and administration officials with enormous online audiences who are waiting for anything—literally anything—that they can claim is evidence of voter fraud. The Trump administration has also been laying the groundwork, priming their electorate to believe that the American voting system is rigged against them.
Within minutes of reports that ballot scanners in Westchester weren’t working, some of the biggest proponents of election conspiracy theories seized on the county-wide glitch to claim that Democrats were sabotaging equipment to prevent Lawler from winning.
The Westchester County board of elections initially blamed the fault on “the thickness of the paper ballots” in a statement issued two hours after polls opened. But 20 minutes later, county officials updated the statement, removing the reference to the thickness of the paper and instead blaming a general “issue involving paper ballots.”
In a separate statement published online, Westchester county executive Ken Jenkins said that once the issues with the ballot machines are resolved, he’ll “convene a bipartisan team to conduct a thorough review of the decisions and failures that led to this debacle, determine where accountability lies and ensure that this never happens again. “I want to be absolutely clear,” Jenkins wrote. “This situation is unacceptable.” Later in the day, New York State officials put out an additional statement, saying that the problem was that most machines in the county had outdated programming, which meant they could not recognize and process Election Day ballots.