Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer listens to complaints while addressing election day ballot shortages in the county.

Matt York/AP

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Matt York/AP

Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer listens to complaints while addressing election day ballot shortages in the county.

Matt York/AP

Last week’s primary in Pinal County, Arizona, was marred by voting issues, giving both Republicans and Democrats plenty of opportunities to push their respective narratives about managing the election.

In Pinal, the state’s third-largest county, more than 10 polling places ran out of ballots on Tuesday.county officials recognized them Could not print enough ballots To meet the demand for in-person voting on Election Day.

Candidates like Kari Lake, who won the Republican nomination for governor of Arizona, seized the error as evidence of a nonexistent and widespread fraud that was a key issue for many Republican campaigns, including her own. rice field.

“Looking at what happened last night and yesterday, I think you can see that there were some very serious issues,” Lake said in a speech Wednesday, the day after the election, declaring a premature victory. fact [that in] People from Pinal County showed up and ran out of ballots an hour after voting started. We have seen fraudulent activity and are monitoring the situation. ”

It wasn’t the first election issue the county handled this year. In early July, thousands of voters Missing or inaccurate local race-mailed ballots.

Democrats acknowledged the problem in Pinal County, southeast of Phoenix, but took a different view of the situation.

Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terran released a statement saying Pinal County’s mistakes were perpetuated by “years of underfunded elections and the counties that run them” and “AZGOP’s distrust of our elections.” accused of “dangerous conspiracy theories”. Election experts fear that this distrust will undermine election operations and drive workers away from the field.

Republican Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer offered a much simpler explanation for the “human error” that left some voters missing or disenfranchised altogether.

“We just didn’t order enough ballots. It was always a guess,” Volkmer told reporters the day after the election. “And we didn’t speculate on the side of securing enough ballots. That’s a mistake the county made.”

Volkmer estimated that hundreds of voters were affected, as about 2.5% of the county’s various ballot formats were affected by the shortage. The county printed about 900 different styles of ballots for the primary election. (Different ballots are printed to reflect the unique races an individual can vote for, depending on where they live.)

While some voters likely did not vote because of the error, Volkmer defended the county’s response as making the best of a bad situation.

“We did the best we could,” he said. “We gave them the ability to wait as long as they could. Some chose not to wait, some chose to leave and come back, some chose to leave and not come back. Some have chosen to do so, and we have no control over that.”

Fire county elections officer

The mic was passed to Pinal County’s Republican candidate after Volkmer announced the county’s statutory discretion at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

“Why on earth was the county unprepared for those who would vote?” Fillmore lamented. “So what do we say to disenfranchised voters?”

“If I can’t trust you guys, who will I trust? And what will happen in November?”

County officials promised that changes would be made. The next day, they achieved something by firing David Frisk, the election director who had just been hired for the job in March.

But it did little to appease Republican leaders, including Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Republican State Commission Chairman Kelly Ward, who had been calling for Frisk’s removal in the wake of the county’s recent missteps. didn’t help.

“The election failure observed by the Joint Election Integrity Program during the Arizona primary is unacceptable and highlights why transparency at the ballot box is so important,” McDaniel and Ward said in a joint statement. “Republicans will continue to hold incompetence accountable, fight for transparency, make voting easier, and cheat harder in Arizona and across the country.”

The statement did not specify what other missteps occurred on Election Day, but the facts do not deter other Republican efforts to cast doubt on the election.

For example, the Maricopa County Republican Executive Committee condemned Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Republican county registrar Stephen Richer cites “administrative error.” (famously scrutinized by Republican state senators via the 2020 election review that ousted the 2020 election) went smoothly.

And Lake, despite claiming victory, told supporters who denied the election that she won despite problems with the polls. .

In his victory speech, Mr. Lake said, “We won the scam,” without citing any concrete evidence. and voted as if their lives depended on it.”

Lake is one of the Republican candidates to vote against the election in November.