“Kari Lake Claims Her Voters Were Disenfranchised. Her Voters Tell a Different Story.”

NYT:

When he stepped inside a Phoenix polling place on the morning of Election Day on the way to work, Kevin Bembry was told that the tabulation machines were not functioning properly and he might want to vote somewhere else.

“I’ve never had that happen before,” Mr. Bembry, 57, a security officer, said in a video later posted online.

His testimony was one of many circulated on social media by activist groups, right-wing media outlets and Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, whose campaign posted Mr. Bembry’s video along with several others on Thursday.

Ms. Lake has vowed to keep fighting the election after her race was called by The Associated Press for her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. Ms. Lake has claimed her defeat was the result of the “disenfranchisement” of her supporters in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and where technical problems on Election Day introduced delays, confusion and conspiracy theories. On Twitter, Ms. Lake’s campaign has claimed that the election was compromised and said that “the appropriate thing to do would be to let Maricopa County cast their votes again.”

But a crucial element has been missing so far in all of these accounts: clear claims that any eligible voters in Maricopa County were actually denied the chance to vote.

The video the campaign circulated of Mr. Bembry, for instance, was an edited version of a longer video posted on the site Rumble. In the full video, he states that, despite the inconvenience, he cast his ballot at a nearby polling site. “I was able to vote — no waiting, no misreads of the tabulation machines, nothing,” he says.

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