As the 2020 Election Day count dragged on into the next morning in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, the New York Times campaign reporter Reid Epstein reported a hiccup at 4:52 a.m.: “Green Bay’s absentee ballot results are being delayed because one of the vote-counting machines ran out of ink and an elections official had to return to City Hall to get more.
Eight minutes later Epstein sent a follow-up tweet giving the all-clear: “Clerk has returned with printer ink!”
This tiny drama from Wednesday, Nov. 4, would be lost to history but for the deep consternation it ignited among influential members of the government and tech industry. Details uncovered in the Twitter Files and revealed here for the first time show that Epstein’s tweet prompted immediate and mostly successful speech suppression efforts by the Department of Homeland Security and others who were intent on undermining any facts or claims that might possibly be used to question the integrity of the 2020 election.
The episode is of more than passing historical note because it is the first known case of the agency attempting to silence a social media account associated with a national newspaper – and because the Times, which has long professed to report the news “without fear or favor,” did little to push back against the censorship, even though nothing has emerged to invalidate Epstein’s reporting.
Epstein’s tweet set off immediate alarm bells in Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. At 5:11 a.m., 19 minutes after Epstein’s first tweet, an election clerk from another part of the state, Rachel Rodriguez, disputed the Times’ reporting on Twitter: “I’m very familiar with the ballot scanners Green Bay uses,” wrote Rodriguez. “There’s no ink involved.”
Four minutes later, at 5:15 a.m., the official Twitter account of the Wisconsin Elections Commission retweeted Rodriguez’s post commenting, “Rachel is correct.”
Except she was not. Although most of Green Bay’s voting machines did not use ink – the DS200, the primary vote-counting machine, relied on thermal tape – that year, there was another machine involved. Local officials, in expectation of higher turnout for the heated presidential race and newly eased rules concerning absentee ballots, opted to additionally use the DS450, a high-speed tabulator that prints results through an external ink-jet printer.
Rodriguez recently told RCI that her 2020 tweet was based on the mistaken understanding that Green Bay used only DS200 machines for the election. She also confirmed that if the city had indeed used a high-speed tabulator, like the DS450 or its variation, the DS850, then her tweet would have been mistaken, because that system uses ink cartridges through an external printer. She explained over phone that her tweet fact-checking Epstein got “way more traction than I thought.” Rodriguez added that “it was 3 a.m. and I was just being sarcastic.”
Her tweet did, indeed, set off a chain reaction at the highest levels..
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