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
This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time of writing:
(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Sat Sep 25 00:17:11 2021 UTC)
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:
The stamp is on top of the triangle. Both the triangle and the stamp are black, so when the scanner inversed the black triangle, you can't see the black stamp on top. pic.twitter.com/x06cnFExxr
-- Mike (@guardian855) September 24, 2021
Arizona Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers tweeted Ayyadurai's image of the envelope after it was shown in the presentation:
Looks like a crime to me. Why is the stamp behind the triangle and there are no signatures? This was APPROVED as a vote. pic.twitter.com/8s01TbM1eJ
-- Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) September 24, 2021
"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.
