Claudia Tenney Election DenialVoting Rights New York

Claudia Tenney Said Democrats 'Will Do Anything and Everything to Cheat' When Westchester's Scanners Failed. State Officials Blamed a Software Update, and a Republican Whose Own Race Was on Those Ballots Said 'There's No Shenanigans.'

Just after 7 a.m. on Election Day, Rep. Claudia Tenney told her followers Democrats were cheating in New York, quoting a poll worker's post about broken machines. The state blamed a programming error. Mike Lawler, whose own race was on those ballots, told voters there were no shenanigans.

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Claudia Tenney Said Democrats 'Will Do Anything and Everything to Cheat' When Westchester's Scanners Failed. State Officials Blamed a Software Update, and a Republican Whose Own Race Was on Those Ballots Said 'There's No Shenanigans.'
Photo: official congressional portrait

On the morning of Election Day, ballot machines across Westchester County, New York, would not read people's paper ballots. It hit 44 of the county's 45 municipalities.

Nobody knew why yet. Claudia Tenney didn't wait to find out.

At about 7:13 a.m. Eastern, the Republican congresswoman quoted a post from someone who said they were a poll worker: none of the machines worked, and it was happening all over the county. Here is what Tenney added:

"No surprise. The Democrats in NY will do anything and everything to cheat."

Westchester isn't even in her district. She represents a part of upstate New York. She had no evidence in that post. It has no link and names no person. It just says the word "cheat" about an election that had barely started.

What actually happened

The New York Board of Elections blamed a programming glitch. According to the Associated Press report PBS carried, officials said a software update for one municipal contest was made after the machines had been prepared and tested. Machines in other towns stayed on the older software, so they couldn't read the ballots.

It was a bad failure, and voters had every right to be angry. Lines got long. The county Board of Elections first pointed to the thickness of the paper ballots, then dropped that explanation. County Executive Ken Jenkins said he'd convene a bipartisan team to review what went wrong.

But a mistake is not cheating, and the votes were not lost. Voters put their finished ballots into bags that were kept safe to be processed later. The AP reported the bags were to go to a county warehouse under police escort, and that scanning there would happen with representatives of the political parties watching.

A Republican on those ballots said the opposite

The person with the most to lose from a stolen count in Westchester was not Claudia Tenney. It was Mike Lawler, the Republican whose race ran through that county.

He said the mess had caused "a lot of frustration, delays, lines and a lot of questions." Then he told voters what Tenney wouldn't.

"There's no shenanigans going on here," Lawler said.

We have written plenty about Lawler on this site, and none of it is flattering. On this, he did the responsible thing, and he conceded his race to Democrat Cait Conley. Tenney, who wasn't on those ballots, had already accused Democrats of cheating.

She was part of a chorus

NBC News listed her post among the claims spreading that day, right alongside Laura Loomer's and Katie Miller's. NBC noted that these accusations echo what Trump and his supporters said in past elections.

That is the difference. Loomer is an influencer. Tenney is a member of Congress, and she took an oath.

It also isn't new for her. In May 2021, months after the courts had thrown out the fraud claims, she told CNN, "We don't know if it was stolen or not." This summer she rolled out a plan to make it harder to register and vote, built on that same doubt.

The facts, in short

Claudia Tenney told the public on Election Day morning that New York Democrats "will do anything and everything to cheat," quoting a post about broken machines in a county she doesn't represent. State election officials blamed a software update made after testing, the ballots were bagged to be moved under police escort, and Mike Lawler, whose own race was on those ballots, said "there's no shenanigans going on here." Her post offered no evidence.

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