USA Today, in attempting to fact-check an important claim of election irregularity made by an Arizona poll watcher, gets significant facts wrong, an analysis by In the News has found.
The article attempts to fact-check the claim made by Sarah O’Neill, an Election Day poll observer in Arizona, that there were about 200 more reported ballots at the voting center she was stationed in than voters who had checked in at that location to vote.
USA Today firstly claims O’Neill did not contact any of the people she claimed to contact, such as Arizona Republican Party officials. O’Neill disputes this claim.
“Throughout the day I accessed the reporting mechanisms provided to MC GOP Poll Observers:
‘InitLive’ App, az.protectthevote.com, saveaznow.com, and direct email to Mickie Niland, MC GOP Chair,” O’Neill told ITN today. “I have no knowledge of who specifically receives the issue reports.”
Screengrabs of the submissions given to ITN by O’Neill corroborate her statements.
USA Today goes on to claim it would be impossible for O’Neill to have obtained specific voter data because poll watchers did not have access to that data. Apparently poll observers were denied check-in data and told it was only available through the County, not the vote center.
But that is incorrect. By law, it is part of the on-site reconciliation process. It would be illegal for a poll observer to have direct access but it is supposed to be provided to observers via the on-site reconciliation process.
Kochi also claims to have asked O’Neill for comment but did not receive a response. ITN also rates this claim as false. O’Neill responded to Kochi’s post in less than an hour, asking for credentials from Kochi as Kochi’s Gettr profile did not provide any proof of identity, not even a profile picture. Kochi never responded to O’Neill’s request. The fact-check article wasn’t posted for another nearly 5 hours.
“I attempted to contact Sudiksha Kochi to confirm who she was but she left no specific contact information on her Gettr post to me,” O’Neill says of Kochi’s request of comment. “I was then surprised to see such a poorly written USA Today ‘Fact Check’ article that was itself proven FALSE by both the AZ AG Memo to Maricopa Election Officials and by the information I had which I would’ve gladly provided.”
USA Today seems to have been made aware of O’Neill’s post by a screen shot of O’Neill’s original Gettr post which was posted on the popular social media platform Instagram. That post has now been censored. The picture is labeled as “False Information” and the disclaimer “Reviewed by independent fact-checkers” appears over a blurred-out version of the post.
One of the “independent fact-checkers” cited by Instagram is USA Today. But USA today’s fact checking operations are funded in part by a grant from social media giant Facebook. Facebook is the parent company of Instagram.
A request for comment from the author of the USA Today story, as well as a request from Facebook on the seeming circular reasoning for their censorship of the post about O’Neill’s claim were not immediately returned. This post will be updated with comments if/when they are received.
Arizona has been mired in numerous claims of voting irregularity since Election Day. Nearly 100% of ballots were rejected on their first try and 48% of all voting machines in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest, malfunctioned on Election Day. The majority of Election Day voters are Republican voters. No such difficulties have been reported in collecting and tabulating mail-in ballots collected in Maricopa County starting on October 29. Mail-in voters were shown to overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Late yesterday, the Republican Party Chairs of all 15 Arizona counties, along with the Chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, signed a letter to the Arizona Board of Supervisors calling on them to delay certifying the election results of Maricopa County until accusations of election irregularities are thoroughly investigated.