A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Nothing ‘secret’ about Arizona voting machine testing shown on video, officials say
CLAIM: Newly released video shows election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County illegally conducting “secret” voting equipment tests ahead of last November’s contested midterms.
THE FACTS: The video comes from the county’s live broadcast of the election process last fall and isn’t new footage. Election officials say it shows the installation and testing of new memory cards on ballot counting machines just days prior to the November election. But social media users are falsely suggesting the video is new evidence of ballot rigging in the contested November election in the county, which covers the Phoenix area. The video shows a small group of election staffers working on vote tabulation machines in a large warehouse-like space. “New (asterisk)video evidence(asterisk) of Maricopa election officials illegally breaking into sealed election machines after they were tested, reprogramming memory cards,” wrote one Twitter user in a post that’s been liked or shared more than 133,000 times as of Thursday. “This is the story of a sabotage,” tweeted the campaign of Kari Lake, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor, sharing the video. But there’s nothing new about the clip and it doesn’t show anything clandestine, say election officials and experts. Matt Roberts, a spokesperson for Maricopa County Election Department, said the video clips are from the county’s own livestream of its ballot tabulation center on Oct. 14, 17 and 18. He said workers in the video are installing new memory cards into the machines and then running test ballots to make sure the system is operating properly, a process that happens before…
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