False claim that 17,000 duplicate ballots were cast in 2020 in Arizona county | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: There were 17,000 duplicate ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2020

An Aug. 10 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot of a post that features former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich speaking at a lectern.

“I don’t understand how Maricopa County can have 17,000 Duplicate Ballots and NO prosecutions,” reads part of the text included in the post.

The Instagram post received more than 800 likes in less than two weeks.

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Our rating: False

There were not 17,000 duplicate ballots cast in Maricopa County in the 2020 presidential election, according to election officials and independent experts. An audit found there were more than 17,000 duplicate images of mailed ballot envelopes, the byproducts of a routine process called signature curing.

Claim confuses ballots, photos of envelopes

There is no evidence that thousands of duplicate ballots were discovered in Maricopa County. There are no credible news reports about such a finding and a 2021 Republican-backed audit of the election found no evidence of fraud.

The same audit found there were 17,126 duplicate images of ballot envelopes – not actual ballots. The post appears to be conflating those two.

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“These are not ‘duplicate’ ballots,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said in an email to USA TODAY.

Those extra images were the byproducts of the routine process called signature curing that allows voters to correct mistakes with a ballot submitted by mail, both experts and election officials said. No matter how many times an envelope is scanned and photographed, it is not opened unless the signature is verified, according to the county's election department.

“As voters cure signature issues, we take another image of the envelope,” said Sierra Ciaramella, a spokesperson for the county’s recorder’s office, which oversees mail voting. “Only one ballot was counted for each envelope.”

When a ballot is mailed to the elections office, a photo of the outer envelope is taken. If there is a problem with that envelope – for example, if the signature is missing or illegible – the voter is contacted and asked to correct the error, said Charles Stewart, an election security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an email to USA TODAY.

When that happens, another photo of the envelope is taken, and only then is the ballot removed from the envelope to be scanned, Stewart said.

“The rules are strict, precisely to prevent fraud, so it's easy to make mistakes,” Steven Bellovin, a security expert at Columbia University, said in an email to USA TODAY. “If that happens, you can be notified and correct the error.”

Arizona has been the focus of a series of false claims about election fraud ever since President Joe Biden won the state by about 10,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim 17K duplicate ballots cast in Maricopa County | Fact check