Bad scanner had no effect on Chicago suburb vote counting | Fact check

An Oct. 22 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) features a video of a man talking about his attempt to vote. “Well, so much for early voting,” he says. “Their scanner’s broken, and they said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll just put it in the box, and we’ll make sure we scan them all tonight when everybody leaves.’ And I said, ‘No, I’ll come back another day.'”
The video’s caption reads in part, “Here We Go Again Schaumburg, Illinois Not Recording Votes, Just putting votes ‘in a box.’”
The post was liked more than 3,000 times in eight days. Similar claims could be found elsewhere on Instagram.
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The ballots were handled properly and counted according to protocol, a spokesperson said. They were stored temporarily in a locked ballot box until the scanner was repaired. They were then scanned the same day so they could be formally accepted and will be counted with all other votes on Election Day.
At about 10 a.m. on Oct. 21, the ballot scanner went out of service at the Trickster Art Gallery in Schaumburg Township, one of more than 50 early voting locations to open up in Chicago’s Cook County suburbs. As the social media post says, voters were told that their physical ballots would be placed in a locked alternate ballot box to be held until the scanner was repaired.
While the social media post says the ballots would not be counted – and suggests something nefarious could happen to them – all 760 votes cast that day at the polling location were properly scanned and accepted the same day, according to Frank Herrera, a spokesperson for the Cook County Clerk’s Office.
Herrera told USA TODAY that the scanner was serviced, and normal operations resumed by about 2 p.m.
“If the ballot scanner took a voter’s ballot, it was accepted right then and there,” he wrote in an email. “If there was an issue and the ballot scanner did not take the ballot, it was then stored in the alternate ballot box until the scanner could be fixed, and it was then fed through the scanner by the election judges later that day after the repair. It would be accepted as soon as it was scanned in.”
At least one judge from each party is present when the ballots are scanned, he noted. The votes are then formally counted on Election Day.
Fact check: Election officials debunk claim that marked ballots are invalid
The procedure is spelled out in Cook County’s 2024 manual for election judges and was also in place during the 2022 gubernatorial election. It was also in line with best practices recommended by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.  
USA TODAY could not reach the Instagram users who shared the claim for comments.
PolitiFact and Check Your Fact also debunked the claim.
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