Trump supporters “are promoting a baseless conspiracy theory that poll workers tricked Trump voters by providing them with Sharpies to cast their votes, and then rejected the ballots due to the use of the marker,” Huffington Post reported. Read story here.
Question: How would poll workers know who someone is going to vote for?
Huffington Post says, “The theory, trending as #SharpieGate on social media, appears to have first emerged in Arizona and has since spread to parts of Pennsylvania. The claims are untrue: Election officials in both states have confirmed that Sharpies are an acceptable writing instrument for filling out ballots and that ballots are not being rejected due to Sharpie use.
“The felt-tip pen ballot controversy burning through social media is false. Don’t get caught up in it,” Pima County, Arizona, officials tweeted on Wednesday.
They added, “All ballots in which voter intent can be discerned will be counted. No ballots will be discarded because of the method used to color in the ovals.”
Photo: After voters mark their ballots, they insert them into an optical scanning machine that reads the marks. The machine can’t tell the difference between Sharpie ink and ballpoint pen ink.