While the November 2020 general election has spawned an entire economic ecosystem around audits, election challenges, and election integrity in general, documents provided to the Arizona Daily Independent make it clear that legitimate concerns regarding a vote count in a Maricopa County Election were raised immediately after the primary election months earlier, a complaint was filed with Arizona’s Attorney General, and then that complaint and its warning signs were largely ignored.
The GOP primary race for County Assessor featured Rodney Glassman versus Eddie Cook. Cook was the choice of the County establishment and was supported by members of the Board of Supervisors, who appointed him to the position earlier in the year. Glassman spent a good portion of his campaign criticizing the Board of Supervisors for increasing the tax bills of county residents, earning himself attacks from Supervisors Clint Hickman, Steve Chucri, and others in the process.
Glassman enjoyed a financial advantage and a larger number of endorsements and, according to documents provided to the Attorney General’s office, held a consistent lead in polling the entire month of primary voting. On Election Night, Cook won by approximately 6% in what was considered an upset. The real story related to the discrepancy between polling and results has remained largely unknown to the public until very recently. It was, however, known to Scottsdale Republican Elijah Norton, who was concerned enough that he filed a complaint with the AG’s office last August, including both his concerns and supporting statements from two prominent and successful Republican campaign consultants.
According to polling done by both Glassman’s campaign and independent pollsters, Glassman held a consistent double-digit lead that varied from 10-20 points across the county, and the difference between the expected results and announced results were so large that the race was re-polled after it was over, with results confirming a massive Glassman lead.
“I have been doing this work for decades and have not only never seen this, I have never even heard of anything like this.” wrote Chuck Warren, whose Protect Your Tax Dollars PAC did polling on a number of county races as well as several other key Republican primaries. “We ran our poll on July 27th and 28th and surveyed about 1,500 people each night. The first night had Glassman up by a 60-40 margin and the second night had Glassman up by a 59-41 margin, and this was of voters who had already voted. At the same time we also surveyed the Sheriff’s race and those numbers came out Arpaio +1 over Sheridan. Would also add that we did a number of surveys for other races and they all came out dead on, +/- 1%.”
Warren’s numbers were reinforced by those generated by Glassman’s internal polling numbers, where according to Constantin Querard, Glassman’s campaign consultant, “…in every Assessor poll we had Glassman +10 or so… Now, that would be like 30-20 with 50% undecided, so you could construct a scenario where Cook finished really strongly and overcame the 10-point lead. But the longer the lead held firm, the less likely that was, because each day that went by that Glassman was ahead by 10 points, his lead in the ballot box from returned ballots was growing.”
Yet in spite of these results, Election Night was a Cook victory from the first drop of early ballot numbers to Election Day voters. The outcome was entirely unexpected and prompted a series of conversations between the various consultants and other political and polling professionals who were not involved up to that point.
“I have spoken with a number of other professional pollsters, we have gone back to double check our work, and there is no logical explanation for everything being dead on while one race is off by more than 25%. 5% sure, but not 15% and definitely not 25%. The difference actually bothered me so much that I went back into the field a couple of nights ago, on Tuesday, August 11, and I ran another poll testing all three contested county races – Sheriff, Assessor, and Treasurer… What I find mind boggling is that in this fresh survey of approximately 1,400 voters countywide, Glassman was again favored by nearly 20%,” Warren wrote.
So both Warren’s and Querard’s polling was accurate in every race they were polling, often to a very high degree of precision, yet the announced Glassman-Cook results were off by a staggering 26%? Querard refused to believe that polling errors would explain the difference, especially since the results came from the same polls that were producing exact results in other races.
According to Querard, “…there is no reason for thousands of voters to conceal their true intentions on a race as low profile as County Assessor or on two candidates as relatively low profile as Eddie Cook and Rodney Glassman. Especially while those same voters are telling the truth to an extremely high degree of accuracy on every other race they are being asked about, including a higher profile Sheriff’s race featuring Joe Arpaio.”
“Something went wrong, and it did not go wrong in the polling, or the error would not have repeated itself over and over again, with different groups of voters, over several weeks,” wrote Warren.
Querard did not comment for this story except to say that he had no idea what the Attorney General’s office did or didn’t do about the matter, and he had not been contacted regarding it. Warren told ADI, “I am not a conspiracy theorist, but have been baffled and flummoxed by the results. Polling professionals I talked to after about this discrepancy were also scratching their heads.”
Because of the refusal to properly investigate the matter, Arizona voters may never know what went wrong. Worse still, whatever flaws in the system might have been revealed in time for the 2020 general election, remain hidden to this day.
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