The shaky start to voting in the mid-term elections in Arizona’s Maricopa County on Tuesday prompted Fox News host Tucker Carlson to call for an end to the use of electronic voting machines.
Carlson insisted that “the core problem” is “we’re not really very serious about democracy if we’re using electronic voting machines or if we’re not requiring photo ID to vote".
Approximately an hour after the voting began, some of Maricopa County’s 223 voting sites started to experience technical issues with the tabulators, according to the state’s media outlets. Ballots were not being read properly because the formatting marks were not dark enough for the tabulators to read, thanks to the printer settings, officials were cited as saying. According to various estimates, between 10 and 30 percent of the electronic vote tabulation machines in the county were malfunctioning at some point until technicians fixed the issue.
“You’re going to have these moments where everybody in the country fears volatility because one side doesn’t believe the result is real. You see it on both sides,” said Carlson as polls began to close and initial election results started to seep into media reports.
“It’s not just, you know, ‘the crazy right.’ It’s everybody is losing faith in the system itself. So I hope if there’s one thing that comes out of this, and I hope it’s bipartisan - no electronic voting machines. Require ID, and then we can just call it a day,” Carlson added.
Referring to the glitches with machines provided by technology firm Dominion Voting Systems, he emphasized that incidents like that “shake people’s faith in the system”.
The present malfunctions with software used by Dominion Voting Systems were immediately seized upon by former President Donald Trump, who wrote on his Truth Social platform, "Reports are coming in from Arizona that the Voting Machines are not properly working in predominately Republican/Conservative areas. Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!"
Right after the elections in 2020, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, the former POTUS and his campaign blamed massive use of voter fraud by the Democrats in several states. Specifically, Trump accused Dominion Voting Systems - that provided the voting machines - of illegally deleting an estimated 2.7 million votes cast for him. The technology firm rejected the accusations. The former Republican president also claimed that victory had been “stolen” from him via manipulations involving mail-in ballots in key swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, despite a plethora of irregularities manifest throughout the election process in 2020, all efforts to provide solid proof fell through, and Trump and his legal team failed to win any lawsuits upholding the accusations in courts.
On 8 November, people across America headed to the polls to decide the fate of all 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate, as well as 36 gubernatorial seats and 88 state legislature seats.