Arizona video shows routine, pre-election preparations, not foul play, officials said

An Instagram post shared a video that purported to show election interference in Arizona’s most populous county, the target of numerous unfounded claims in 2020 and 2022 of election misconduct.

"New video evidence of Maricopa election officials illegally breaking into sealed election machines after they were tested, reprogramming memory cards, and reinstalling them," said text on the video.

The video shows people moving around in a room that contains voting machines, but it’s not clear from the footage what they are doing.

Text under the video says, "59% of these machines would shut down on election day in GOP areas. They’ve been caught." 

The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Election officials in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, said the video came from the county’s own surveillance system and shows employees executing routine functions ahead of the Nov. 8, 2022, election.

Maricopa County Elections Department spokesperson Matt Roberts pointed PolitiFact to a document the county filed in court in response to a lawsuit from Kari Lake, the 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate. 

The court filing cited by the county said the video is from October and shows election workers installing memory cards on vote tabulation machines, a process that was recorded and livestreamed by the county’s own cameras.

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The memory cards had "previously been certified through the statutorily required logic and accuracy testing," Roberts said.

After the memory cards are installed, the tabulators are affixed with "tamper-evident seals," he said. 

Lake’s lawsuit alleged election misconduct and sought to reverse her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake claimed in a May 30 interview on Steve Bannon’s "War Room" podcast that the video showed the machines were programmed to fail on election day.

A Washington Post analysis published Nov. 13, 2022, found that of the 70 out of 223 Maricopa County voting locations that experienced ballot-printing problems on Election Day, none skewed overwhelmingly Republican. The glitch caused some voters to go elsewhere to cast ballots, but no voters were prevented from voting. 

The analysis found that the proportion of registered Republicans in the affected precincts, about 37%, is nearly the same as the share of registered Republicans in the county, which is 35%.

On May 23, a judge rejected Lake’s claims and confirmed Hobbs as the winner.

We rate the claim that video shows officials in Maricopa County "illegally breaking into" voting machines False.

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