Kari Lake Claims Her Voters Were Disenfranchised. Her Voters Tell a Different Story.

Kevin Bembry was told on the way to work that the tabulation machines were malfunctioning and he might want to vote somewhere else.

The security officer said in a video that he had never had that happen before.

His testimony was one of many that was shared on social media by activist groups, right-wing media outlets and the Republican candidate for governor.

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Lake vowed to keep fighting after her race was called for her opponent. Lake claimed that her defeat was the result of the disenfranchisement of her supporters in Maricopa County, where technical problems on Election Day caused delays, confusion and conspiracy theories. The appropriate thing to do would be to allow the people of Maricopa County to cast their votes again.

There are clear claims that eligible voters in the county were denied the chance to vote.

An edited version of a longer video was posted on the site Rumble. He stated in the video that he cast his ballot at a nearby polling site even though it was inconvenient. He says that he was able to vote.

The New York Times reviewed 45 accounts offered by voters and 20 additional accounts from poll workers and observers in legal filings, public meeting testimony, submissions to the Arizona secretary of state's office and on social media posts associated with Lake.

Voters acknowledged that they had been able to cast their votes in 34 of the 45 accounts.

Three other people said they ran into problems with their voter registration. Only one voter, who did not give her full name, claimed to have actually been denied the chance to cast a ballot. The voter said that her late arrival may have been the reason she was unable to vote.

Voters were unsure about whether they had successfully cast a ballot or if their vote had not been counted.

The Election Integrity Network, a national right-wing election activist group, released two reports on Saturday and The Times reviewed them.

In an interview, Bembry, the security officer, said the same thing that he had said in the video. He thought the poll worker gave him the wrong information. He went to a polling site, cast his ballot, and arrived at work about 10 minutes to spare.

All voters who went to vote in person on Tuesday were given the chance to do so.

Lake's lawyers are looking at more damning evidence that they have not made public. A spokeswoman for the campaign said on Thursday that they would try to find out if it was incompetence or malice.

Has the NYT quantified how many voters are too many? Is it 5000, 100, 500, or 25,000?

Lake and her supporters would dispute a loss in the race for governor. During her campaign, Lake refused to say if she would accept the result if she lost, despite her endorsement by Donald Trump. Lake told CNN in October that he would accept the results of the election.

The margin of victory for Lake was 0.6% as of Saturday morning. The election is expected to be certified by the state.

The drama in recent days is similar to what happened in the post-2020 election period, when the movement pushing false claims that the last presidential election had been stolen from Trump came to prominence. The final battleground for 2020 election deniers will likely be the state of Arizona because of Lake's public denunciations about the election results.

Lake said that the elections are a circus run by clowns.

Legal experts say the evidence presented so far by the campaign has fallen short of what is needed to mount a serious legal challenge to the election result. In this case, throwing out more than 2.5 million actual votes statewide because of claims of voting slowdowns and technical difficulties is very rare.

Sarah Brannon is a managing attorney with the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. We want systematic fixes for the future.

Many of the voters' accounts and the Lake campaign's claims have their beginnings in a widespread malfunction of voting equipment early on the morning of Election Day that caused delays and confusion. The voting issues are playing out in the nation's fourth-most populous county, which has a population of more than half of Arizona's.

Megan Gilbertson, a spokeswoman for the county elections department, said that by 6:30 a.m. on Election Day, technicians had started reporting technical issues.

The chief executive of Runbeck Election Services said, "They're like, 'Hey, the ballots aren't tabulating - they're not going through the precinct scanner.'"

Due to the fact that Arizonans can vote at any polling place in their home county, Runbeck has a contract with the county to service its voting centers. He realized the printers were to blame after seeing a photograph of the ballots.

The tabulators used at the polling locations were not able to read some of the ballots because they had been printed too lightly. None of the voting centers used tabulators until after the election. Early votes were kept to be counted later.

The problem was caused by the insufficient temperature of the fuser, the component of a laser printer that heats the toner and causes it to adhere to paper.

According to Gilbertson, at least one printer failed at 70% of the polling places.

The mass malfunction of the printers had baffled the company's technicians, as well as the county's. Once the more immediate task of counting the ballots was done, a full investigation would be conducted.

Gilbertson said that they would look into the root cause.

The problem with the printer was solved by technicians by the morning of Election Day. Voters were offered three options to cast their ballot. They could be put in a locked box beneath the tabulator and taken to the central elections facility in Phoenix.

Within two hours of the first printer problems, wild claims and free-floating suspicions were circulating on social media, including posts by the chairwoman of the state Republican Party and a Republican congressman. The voters who were affected by the glitch of their options, including using Box 3, should not put their money in town. Today is not the day that the tabulators downtown are turned on. Her post was shared hundreds of times.

Lake's campaign began to push back on its political allies' claims as the day wore on.

The lawyer for the campaign tried to assure voters about the integrity of their ballots that had been set aside. She wrote that they had to have this. It isn't a bad thing. At a news conference, Lake urged her supporters to stay in line to vote, and again reassured them that they would be able to use Box 3.

Box 3 claims and other conspiracy theories have been blamed for making the printer malfunction worse. Out of the 1.6 million votes counted so far in the county, 146 were set aside for further research because voters checked in at more than one polling place.

Bill Gates is the chairman of the board of supervisors and a former election lawyer.

Things slowed down because of that. Was there a line? I agree. A certain political party is to blame for those lines.

Floyd G. Brown is the founder of the right-wing website Western Journal.

A person with knowledge of the talks said that Brown had held lengthy discussions with a close circle of Lake campaign associates.

He said he worked with the Lake team on a war for Arizona. She will not be quiet in the evening.

The New York Times Company is owned by The New York Times.