The San Diego County Registrar of Voters attempted to ease concerns over ballot counting Thursday by releasing a statement regarding Sharpie markers.
Using a Sharpie on a San Diego County ballot does not invalidate it, although the county offers another kind of pen at in-person voting locations.
“In San Diego County, we do not provide Sharpies to voters to mark their ballot,” the registrar’s statement reads. “What we use are archival pens, which we researched over 10 years ago as the best marking instrument for a voter. The ink in the archival pen actually helps in preventing bleed-through of the ballot while ensuring the “bubble” is clearly marked.
A theory has arisen in the past 48 hours — particularly in Arizona, where the presidential race is extremely tight — that ballots marked with Sharpies are being invalidated. Some social media users in Arizona are decrying the use of Sharpies as invalidating in-person votes, which have broken largely for President Donald Trump over his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
According to the Maricopa County Elections Department, Sharpies are used at some polling places because they provide the fastest-drying ink. Election officials there said machines would have no problem reading a Sharpie-marked ballot, and theories to the contrary are baseless.
The San Diego County Registrar of Voters offered similar sentiment.
“Using a Sharpie does not invalidate the ballot,” said the office’s statement. “Our voting system prevents a situation where if a voter uses a Sharpie to vote and it bleeds through to the other side, it will not impact, and ‘bubbles’ on the opposite side.”
The county has recorded more than 1.2 million ballots with an estimated 370,000 left to be processed. An update will come at or after 5 p.m. Thursday night.
Dubbed “Sharpiegate” by conservatives on social media, the allegations could be used to try to undermine election results in the historically Republican state of Arizona, which the Associated Press called for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden with 51% of the vote.
Similar rumors about Sharpies or other writing tools and ballots have circulated in Chicago, Michigan, Massachusetts and Connecticut in recent days.
Maricopa County officials were trying to inform voters that Sharpies did not interfere with ballots, and had posted a video explaining that on Election Day.
The county – which includes Arizona’s biggest city, Phoenix – last year rolled out new tabulation equipment that made Sharpie pens the best option on Election Day because they have the fastest drying ink, said Megan Gilbertson, the Maricopa County Elections Department’s communications director.
AZ update: apparently the use of sharpie pens in gop precincts is causing ballots to be invalidated. Could be huge numbers of mostly Trump supporters. More to come
— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) November 4, 2020
We have been receiving questions about ballots filled out with Sharpie markers. Please see below for additional details: pic.twitter.com/zXJc4a8rOF
— SAN DIEGO COUNTY ROV (@SDVOTE) November 5, 2020
“The Sharpies are just fine to use,” Gilbertson said in an interview. “They do not impact tabulation, and we encourage them on Election Day because of how fast the ink dries.”
By Tuesday night, some Arizona Trump voters had begun to question whether ballots had been counted.
Andrea Thiele, 48, of Surprise, Arizona, said in an interview that when she took her daughter to vote she noticed Sharpies and found them “fishy.”
The voting machine accepted her daughter’s ballot, she said.
Later, however, she discovered a viral Facebook video saying that Trump voters had their ballots rejected after Maricopa County poll workers had given voters Sharpies.
Now she is concerned the ballot wasn’t counted.
“I suspect there’s fraud happening, absolutely,” she said.
The state attorney general’s office said in a statement to Reuters on Wednesday it had received hundreds of complaints about Sharpie use and sent a letter to Maricopa County officials to investigate the concerns.
“There is no concern about ballots being counted because of the pen being used to count ballots,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said on CNN Wednesday.
By Wednesday afternoon, the video Thiele saw had been shared on Facebook 101,000 times, and had been promoted by prominent conservatives, including Sidney Powell, the attorney representing former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Following those 101,000 shares, it was labeled “false information” on Facebook by fact-checkers who have partnered with the social media company to root out disinformation about the 2020 election.
Facebook has also blocked the hashtag “#sharpiegate,” Facebook spokeswoman Andrea Vallone said, while a Twitter spokeswoman said the social media company was labeling tweets that “misleadingly claim ballots were invalidated.”
American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp has also repeated the fraud claims on Twitter and urged voters to report them to the Arizona attorney general’s office.
Schlapp and Powell could not immediately be reached for comment.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief technology officer and now director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, told reporters Wednesday the allegations were “disinformation.”
“Once this idea was out there in the zeitgeist, it was picked up,” he said.
— City News Service and Reuters contributed to this report.
