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Can Philadelphia’s ballot counters outrun election lies?

The machines trying to speed up the slow crawl of democracy.

It’s a highly regimented process that takes place in a sprawling warehouse in northeast Philadelphia, filled with the sounds of whirring ballot-sorting machines and the constant rifling of paper. On Election Day, workers will open hundreds of thousands of mailed ballots and feed them into machines that read and count them, keeping a careful eye on monitors flagging any irregularities. Sabir smiles as he relates one of the “craziest” conspiracy theories: a blog post that claimed he was personally taking ballots to a mobster in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to be destroyed.

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