Voting had only been underway in the US for a few hours and polls still hadn't even opened in some parts of the country, but Republican strategist and pro-Trump influencer Joey Mannarino had apparently seen enough.
"MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF VOTER FRAUD BEING REPORTED ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!" Mannarino asserted on X at 9:02 am EST, offering no evidence to support his declaration. "The Democrats are stealing our country right out from under us!"
As in any other election year, as polling places opened, people began showing up to vote, and voting machines started whirring into action, some jurisdictions ran into problems.
Severe flooding along Florida's Space Coast meant about 20 polling places had to be moved. Bad storms over the weekend likely caused brief power outages in Arizona's Maricopa County, forcing the temporary closure of several polling places. Pennsylvania's Luzerne County was missing a scanner box. And in Westchester County, New York, voting in the hotly contested House race between incumbent Republican representative Mike Lawler and Democrat Cait Conley hit a roadblock early on Tuesday morning when machines stopped accepting paper ballots.
Voting machine malfunctions—much like bad weather and power outages—are fairly common during elections. While typically attributable to some mundane problem like ageing components, these malfunctions are often the source of rumors or conspiracy theories.
And like other election years in recent memory, there's a network of MAGA influencers, Republican lawmakers, pro-Trump trolls and administration officials with enormous online audiences who are waiting for anything—literally anything—that they can claim is evidence of voter fraud. The Trump administration has also been laying the groundwork, priming their electorate to believe that the American voting system is rigged against them.
Within minutes of reports that ballot scanners in Westchester weren't working, some of the biggest proponents of election conspiracy theories seized on the county-wide glitch to claim that Democrats were sabotaging equipment to prevent Lawler from winning.
The Westchester County board of elections initially blamed the fault on "the thickness of the paper ballots" in a statement issued two hours after polls opened. But 20 minutes later, county officials updated the statement, removing the reference to the thickness of the paper and instead blaming a general "issue involving paper ballots."
In a separate statement published online, Westchester county executive Ken Jenkins said that once the issues with the ballot machines are resolved, he'll "convene a bipartisan team to conduct a thorough review of the decisions and failures that led to this debacle, determine where accountability lies and ensure that this never happens again. "I want to be absolutely clear," Jenkins wrote. "This situation is unacceptable." Later in the day, New York State officials put out an additional statement, saying that the problem was that most machines in the county had outdated programming, which meant they could not recognize and process Election Day ballots.
"The immediate priority is to restore scanning capability to at least one voting machine at every polling location, with additional machines being brought online as the day progresses," officials said. They added that the programming issue had only caused ballots to be rejected, not tabulated incorrectly, so voters should have full confidence that "every valid vote will be counted."
In a post on X, the Republican National Committee wrote that together with Democrats it is "seeking a joint court order to require central tabulation of ballots at the County Board of Elections."
New York representative Claudia Tenney—who has backed efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election—also jumped into the fray. "No surprise," Tenney wrote. "The Democrats in NY will do anything and everything to cheat." Conservative broadcaster Mark Levin shared Tenney's post to his 5 million followers.
All manner of MAGA-world influencers have also weighed in. "This is how the Left steals elections," wrote Katie Miller, who is married to White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller.
"Ban voting machines and prosecute those who've used them to cheat," wrote president Donald Trump's former spokesperson Liz Harrington.
"Democrats are already trying to steal the election in New York today," wrote MAGA influencer Laura Loomer. Loomer also weighed in on polling location problems elsewhere. "The Democrats are already cheating" she wrote on her Loomer Unleashed account, in response to a post about power outages forcing closure of voting centers in Maricopa County.
The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, which tracks online rumors about elections, found that posts on X about the malfunctioning machines—"often with a conspiratorial framing"—were coming about 150 times a minute just after 10:00am EST.
While Lawler urged voters to "stay in line" and cast their ballots despite the issues with the scanners, pro-Trump influencer Phillip Buchanan, known as Catturd, shared Lawler's post writing: "Every. Single. Election. It's always somthing [sic]". Catturd also boosted conspiracies about "Democrat shenanigans" in Florida's Broward County, which suffered technical difficulties which were quickly resolved. MJ Ultra, a prominent pro-Trump QAnon account on X, added: "Broward County Florida is corrupted as hell."
Rogan O'Handley, known online as DC Draino, called what was happening in Westchester the "the Maricopa Method of stealing" while also boosting conspiracy theories about Broward County. Meanwhile Trump's nominee for ambassador to Jamaica, Kari Lake, also shared conspiracy theories about the issues in Westchester, as well as calling out so-called liberal "shenanigans" in Maricopa County. Lake has baselessly claimed her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race and her 2024 Senate race were rigged.
While all of this has been unfolding on X, Trump has been largely preoccupied with other matters. He spent the better part of the morning complaining on Truth Social that people had taken him seriously when he announced—jokingly, he says—on Tuesday his plans to rename the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to "The Trump Reflecting Pool." He eventually got around to posting about Lawler's race, but didn't mention the issues with the ballot scanners.
