'Stay in Line' Trends as Voters Face Technical Issues Nationwide

Voters are on edge today as technical difficulties hit polling sites across the country.

The appeal to "stay in line" is trending on Twitter as people report technical problems in states including Arizona, New Jersey and Texas. Despite reassurances from local election officials, voters have been filmed confronting poll workers while waiting in long lines for the ballot box.

In Arizona's Maricopa County, about 20 percent of polling sites experienced issues with tabulation machines on Tuesday morning, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department. Officials announced that technicians were called in to solve the issue, adding that voters can still place their ballots in a secure box to be counted later.

"This is actually what the majority of Arizona counties do on Election Day all the time," said Recorder Stephen Richer.

Nonetheless, voters in Maricopa County took their anxieties to social media. A viral video tweeted by Tyler Bowyer, the Republican National Committeeman from Arizona, showed people arguing with a poll worker who explained the technical error. The worker attempted to reassure them, "No one is trying to deceive anybody."

"Of course not, not on Election Day, that would never happen, right?" said Bowyer.

Another voter left her place in line, telling the worker, "I don't trust it going into the box. The box may never make it down there."

Republican candidate Kari Lake, running a tight Arizona governor race against Democrat Katie Hobbs, tweeted a response to the video.

"THIS is why we must reform our elections," she said.

An analyst from Insikt Group, a threat research division of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, told Newsweek there is no evidence of deliberate interference in Arizona's elections.

"Based on what we've seen with Maricopa County, we don't have indications at present that the issues with the ballot counters are intentional," said the firm.

Meanwhile, New Jersey's Mercer County battled a system outage on Tuesday. An alert posted to the county's website said, "Due to a countywide system outage, all voting machines are currently down in the County. Voters can still report to their respective polling stations and cast their vote on a standard ballot and insert their ballot into the emergency slot in the machine."

Voters in Texas experienced similar technical difficulties. In Bell County, where staff reported issues with check-in machines, elections officials announced that they were requesting an additional hour of voting this evening to offset the problems. Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum said that Harris County resolved issues after a morning delay, adding that some of the county's polling places might extend their hours as well.

Security experts have predicted a spike in false claims about the accuracy of voting machines following the midterm elections, which could be exacerbated by Tuesday's technical problems.

On Monday, Recorded Future reported it had already found unsubstantiated claims across "numerous facets of the mainstream and alternative social media landscape" that suggested voting systems manufacturers (VSMs) will be used to "falsify the results of the midterms."

"It's very likely that we'll observe increases in false claims of election fraud on November 8 and in the days and weeks that follow the election, and it's very likely that the narrative will continue in the lead-up to and during the 2024 U.S. election," a Recorded Future analyst told Newsweek.

The VSMs most likely to be targeted by misinformation and disinformation are Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic, and Election Systems & Software—all three of which faced unsubstantiated fraud allegations after the 2020 election, said the company's report. Dominion and Smartmatic have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against allies of former President Donald Trump and right-wing media outlets over the voter fraud claims.

Update 11/08/22 3:17 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from an analyst from Insikt Group.