An Illinois township’s ballot scanner was down. Ballots were still processed, contrary to claims.

Voting machines aren’t perfect, and sometimes they break down. That doesn’t stop election workers from processing votes.

On Oct. 21, the first day of early voting in Cook County, Illinois, a ballot scanner in Schaumburg, a Chicago suburb, stopped working. This incident prompted social media posts the next day claiming that votes weren’t being counted. 

"Here we go again. Schaumburg, Illinois not recording votes, just putting votes ‘in a box,’" read the text in an Oct. 22 Instagram video posted by @snowflake_news, the account of influencer Michael Hennessey, who was arrested on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. 

A timestamp on the video said it was 10:45 a.m. on Oct. 21.

"Well, so much for early voting. Their scanner’s broken, and they said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll just put it in the box, and we’ll make sure we scan them all tonight, uh, when everybody leaves,’" the man in the video said. "And I said, ‘No, I’ll come back another day.’"

(Screenshot from Instagram)

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The claim also spread on X, where one user said Oct. 22, "VERY ALARMING: As Illinoisans headed to the polls in Schaumburg to cast their vote during early voting, they were informed that only one scanner was available, and it was broken!! Illinoisans were told they can cast their votes and they will be recorded later. It feels like we’re living in a third world country, doesn’t it?"

The video in the X post appears to feature a person explaining how votes will be processed after the scanner is fixed.

A ballot scanner in Schaumburg did break down, but ballots were still processed. The videos shared on Instagram and X were originally posted by a TikTok user.

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X posts

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The process explained in  the video shared on X matches the protocol followed if voting machines break down in Cook County, where Schaumburg is located, about 30 miles outside Chicago. As of 2020, Schaumburg had a population of 78,723.

Frank Herrera, a Cook County clerk spokesperson, confirmed that the ballot scanner at Trickster Cultural Center, an early voting location in Schaumburg township, was "temporarily down" from about 11 a.m. on Oct. 21, but was restored by 2 p.m. the same day. He said "voting was not affected by the issue."

"All 760 voters who cast a ballot at Trickster had their vote counted on Monday," Herrera said in an email to PolitiFact. It is standard for each early voting location to have one ballot scanner, he said, and Schaumburg has several dozen polling places on Election Day. 

Herrera said that the protocol for ballot scanner issues involves placing all ballots in the alternate ballot box — "a locked box within the voter supply carrier where ballots are stored" — until the scanner’s restoration. The ballots placed in the alternate ballot box were processed after voting concluded that day so that it didn’t interfere with in-person voting, Herrera said.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said in an expert forum hosted by news organization Votebeat that "this is the standard emergency procedure nationwide."

"We don't want to tell voters to come back later because who knows how long it would take to fix a machine," Albert said. "So instead, ballots are placed in a secure location and then scanned when the machine is working again."

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission lists backup secure ballot boxes as a best practice "for storing voted ballots in case the precinct scanner is not working properly or is compromised."

This isn’t a new process for Cook County, either. The "Scanner Troubleshooting" section of the county clerk’s election judge manual for the 2022 gubernatorial general election says that in the event that the scanner is not accepting ballots and power is not the issue, "have voters use the Alternate Ballot Box until your Scanner is fixed or replaced." 

The alternate ballot box is also used during other incidents, such as issues with printers and memory cards. Ballots are stored in the alternate ballot box only if the ballot scanner fails to take the ballots. 

The man in the video’s claim that votes in the alternate ballot box would be processed when no one is around is not true, officials said.

"Once the scanner is repaired, the Alternate Ballot Box is unlocked and the ballots inside are fed through the scanner by our team of Election Judges," Herrera said. "There is at least one judge of each party present to feed the ballots in the scanner."

There’s no proof that Schaumburg, Illinois, is not counting votes after putting them in a box. We rate that claim False.