Did ballots in Arizona show "VERIFIED AND APPROVED" stamps behind a black triangle, meaning that the image was fake or not a valid ballot? No, that's not true
Sep 24, 2021 by: Alexis Tereszcuk
Did ballots in Arizona show "VERIFIED AND APPROVED" stamps behind a black triangle, meaning that the image was fake or not a valid ballot? No, that's not true: The image shown during the presentation of the Maricopa County election audit was an inversed image made by the scanner, the Office of Maricopa County Records told Lead Stories.
The claim appeared as a Twitter post (archived here) on September 24, 2021. It opened:
Twitter September 24, 2021
Kinda fishy that the "Verified and Approved" stamp is behind the triangles on the ballots that were there to show or direct people on where to sign in the BOX!
#MaricopaCountyaudit
#arizona
#audit
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who says that he lost the Republican Senate primary in Massachusetts due to election fraud, and that officials destroyed "ballots" when they erased digital images of paper ballots, a claim Lead Stories has debunked, made the claims about the triangles on Arizona ballots during the September 24, 2021, presentation of the Republican-led audit of election results in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Ayyadurai claimed to have discovered ballots that were given "verified and approved" stamps that were behind the triangle graphic originally printed on the ballot envelope. Here is a link to the video of the presentation on C-SPAN.
Ilene Haber, the Maricopa County Records communications manager, told Lead Stories via email on September 24, 2021, that the scanner inversed the black triangle. "Having actually done signature verification (after an extensive certification process) I can tell you the scanner will at times inverse the image," she said. She also confirmed the image in another tweet showed the exact coloration of the affidavit envelope a voter signs. Here is that tweet:
Arizona Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers tweeted Ayyadurai's image of the envelope after it was shown in the presentation:
"This type of misinformation is incredibily irresponsible and bewildering to us a legislator would not know the color of the affidavit envelope," Haber told Lead Stories.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann presided over the presentation of the audit, noting that the overall votes matched the results in November 2020, news outlets reported. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Arizona.
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