Do Americans have trust in the US government’s promise to protect their sacred right to vote?
A group of Dominion Voting machines in Mercer County, New Jersey, failed as citizens attempted to cast their votes in the midterm elections, resulting in many of them moving to cast paper ballots instead.
Per New Jersey Globe, every voter in Mercer County was forced into filling out a paper ballot before placing them into the “secure” scanner machine storage bin.
Things are not looking good for voting integrity in New Jersey. A total of 3,211 voters from three Princeton districts who cast their ballots at the municipal building could end up disenfranchised should the papers not be recovered, according to a report by the Western Journal. Another 835 Robbinsville residents who voted at the Mercer County Library could face the same fate.
A group of programmers from Dominion Voting Systems went to Mercer County on Election Day after an issue with the machines’ optical scanners prevented the ballots from being read, The Western Journal reported early Tuesday.
“There is a slot on the top of the scanner, and voters can vote and are voting manually,” Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello said at the time.
These ballots were then sent to the “Board of Elections” in order to be manually counted, according to the report.
“This allowed our election to go forward, and we took advantage of that fail-safe measure yesterday,” Covello said. “We were able to bring all of the ballots back to the Board of Elections, where that bipartisan commission processed the ballots’ high-capacity scanners at their central location. Every vote was counted.”
Things changed quickly after Robbinsville Township Mayor Dave Fried sounded the alarm on a batch of missing ballots.
“Robbinsville Township was contacted by Mercer County Election officials at approximately 5 p.m. today and were informed that the ballots of one of our districts had gone missing,” Fried said in a statement on the township’s website Wednesday evening.
“The fundamentals of Democracy is that every vote should be counted… Clearly, this has yet to happen in Robbinsville, as approximately 11% of our residents’ votes have yet to be safely delivered and counted. We’re working with the County, which is in charge of our elections, but please know we will not rest until we get to the bottom of this unconscionable mishap, and we will not consider the 2022 election over in Robbinsville until every single ballot is counted and done so securely.”
New Jersey is not the only state that has seen problems with Dominion Voting machines during the midterm elections. A viral video shared on Twitter by conservative activist Charlie Kirk and many others showed a poll worker in Arizona’s Maricopa County informing election-day voters that the poll machines are broken.
🚨🚨A poll worker in all-important Maricopa County tells Election Day voters the machines are broken. pic.twitter.com/meBTd4Vi2M
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 8, 2022
