The final recount results released Thursday in the Arizona Attorney General election – which narrowed to a very thin margin of 280 votes and confirmed the victory of Democrat Chris Mays – showed a miscount in Pinal County. This indicates that it is the main cause of the shift.
Pinal County is annoyed Of those, 392 were cast for Republican Abe Hamade and 115 were cast for Mays. Nearly all, according to county reports. The discrepancy was due to an election official error. Missubmission of provisional ballots, inadequate training of poll workers, and inadequate counting were to blame.
Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies elections, says it’s normal for counties to see small variations in results (“1 and 2”) because “people make different decisions than machines.” But Pinal’s results are a bigger problem. “If you get numbers in the tens or hundreds, it’s certain that something went wrong with the administration of the first election.”
Pinal County Experienced Incredible turnover rate Number of election staff in the last year. This summer, the Election Commission was fired after only a few months of work for the election. ruin the county primaryAs a result, the county hired reporter Virginia Ross, who had previously managed elections in the county, to oversee the general election.they paid her $200,000 for workfinished in early December after the original canvas and before the recount began.
The office is now run by former Pinal County deputy county attorney Geraldine Rohr, who has not responded to requests for interviews. We worked together and recognized early on that there were multiple and varied errors in precincts across the county. All errors described in 8 page summary Appears to be related to inadequate voting workers and employee training and management released by the county.
The report, which “concluded that human error was responsible for miscounts on Election Day,” gave multiple examples of polling workers who did not follow correct procedures in both voting and counting, led to uncounted or miscounted.
Another report described 63 Election Day ballots with unclear markings by voters that were overlooked. Due to incorrect tabulator settings, they were scanned, but not held for adjudication, but examined to determine the voter’s intentions. When officials discovered the ballots during a recount, a bipartisan committee adjudicated them, copied the votes onto new ballots, and counted them correctly. “As a result, candidates won votes even in constituencies where there was no difference between election day votes and recount votes,” the report explained.
Pinal’s recount results show that counties across the country especially Arizonafacing pressure from conservative activists who are calling on officials to reject election results for vague and often false allegations of fraud. Hundreds of activists are inundated with requests for public records, overwhelming staff. tedious and often pointless work.
In Pinal County, voters threw at local officials through of intriguing accusations. County Sheriff Mark Lamb said, was in it The nation’s most vocal advocate for law enforcement officers involved in electoral administration. And, of course, Pinal County was running with brand new staff and a director who had publicly stated that he would not be staying in office after early December.
A similar situation occurred in Coffee County, Georgia in 2020. management has stalledUltimately, the Georgia Secretary of State started an investigation county and overseer resigned to avoid being fired.
Tammy Patrick, chief executive of the National Association of Elections Commissioners’ Election Centers program, previously ran elections in Maricopa County. In counties experiencing such election administration problems, poll workers and counters “have to develop their own solutions to problems, have election professionals rush to work, They may not follow the response plan,” she said. “Though these concerns can affect the margin of victory, they rarely affect the outcome and ultimate winner of an election.”
of last 20 yearsThe difference between Hamade and Mayes is one of the closest races in state history, but the recount overturned the results of only three races out of 6,000 statewide elections.
Recounting results in the other two counties (Apache and La Paz) also contributed to the reduction in margins, but we found that both counties had much smaller changes in total votes than Pinal counties. . Of his 72 votes added to Apache’s total, 13 went to Hamadeh and 59 to Mayes. Of his 18 votes added to La Paz’s total, 13 went to Hamade and 5 to Mays.
Deb Otis, research director at FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for electoral reform, said it’s normal for counties to get about 0.1% more votes than the original count during a recount. Using county-level data released by the state, Votebeat determined Pinal’s increase in the Attorney General election was 0.36% for him, La Paz for 0.33% for him, and Apache for 0.27% for him. .
The discord in all other Arizona counties was near 0% as a percentage of total votes. In Maricopa County, which cast 1.5 million votes, there was a difference of 5 votes per candidate and a net change in margin of 0.
According to FairVote’s research, only about 14% of statewide recounts conducted nationwide differ by 0.27% or more.
Neither La Paz nor Apache counties responded to requests for interviews, but all counties submitted variance reports to the Secretary of State, explaining discrepancies between the recounts and the original canvases.
In an interview with Votebeat, state elections official Cori Loric said La Paz County’s 17-vote disparity was a result of its failure to save the results of batches of ballots counted during initial counting. rice field. Apache County did not scan his 72 ballots across two batches. As in the case of Pinal, all were human errors, but none represent widespread failures in election administration, though not nearly as many as the list of failures in the Pinal County report.
This is Rorrick’s final week in her position before the new Secretary of State, Democrat Adrian Fontes, arrives with his own staff. Her proposal is to better train officials statewide on how to implement settlements, the process of checking the results of each precinct to make sure every ballot is properly accounted for. Yes. State guidelines recommend this method, but it is not required in Arizona. Larger counties like Maricopa naturally make adjustments, but smaller counties have inconsistent procedures and recounting reveals different kinds of errors.
“That’s the lesson learned. We need to make sure that every county has a settlement process,” said Lorick. Although the state provides training on Settlement Best Practices, the state secretary does not have the authority to require counties to receive training.
Nonetheless, Rorick said the mass turnover of Arizona’s election officials is a clear indication that the state needs to “enhance” its current one-day training sessions. “The La Paz manager was a rookie. The whole Pinal team is new.
Pinal County was the last county to submit recount results to the state, forcing the Secretary of State to delay providing the final numbers. in a week The county struggled through the settlement process to complete the recount under an all-new election administrator.
Before the recount, Rolle was publicly optimistic, predicting that the recount would take only “a few days” and that little would change. was.Pinal officials say the recount should be quick and smooth”
Votebeat Arizona reporter Jen Fifield and story editor Carrie Levine contributed to this report.
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