When Pinal County announced last week that hundreds of validly cast ballots were not counted during the 2022 General Election, officials focused on the fact any votes on those ballots for Arizona Attorney General and Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction have now been tabulated as part of the statutory recount of the two races.
But many voters are focused on what the Dec. 29 statement from Pinal County “management” ignores – the fact that valid votes in every other race on those 500 or so ballots were not counted at all. And whether those never counted votes would have changed any local races, or perhaps triggered a statutory recount in one or more races.
As previously reported by Arizona Daily Independent, some Pinal County officials were aware of questions with their tabulated vote counts when the board of supervisors canvassed the county’s election results on Nov. 21.
The extent of the tabulation problems was better understood a few weeks later but never disclosed to either judge hearing the election challenges filed by Abe Hamadeh and Kari Lake.
Pinal County Officials Stayed Mum About Vote Count Discrepancies During Election Trials
One issue with the timing of Pinal County’s canvass is that it occurred one week before the deadline, taking away critical time for then-Elections Director Virginia Ross to ensure a proper reconciliation of vote totals before canvassing.
The statewide canvass which took place Dec. 5 triggered a mandatory recount by all 15 counties in the AG and Superintendent races due to the close margins. And it would not be long before even more discrepancies came to light at Pinal County as described in its Recount Variance Report to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
“One factor underlying this disparity is that the canvass was filed prior to taking an adequate opportunity to investigate any possible anomalies we could discern from polling place returns,” Pinal County’s new election director, Geraldine Roll, wrote on Dec. 21.
Roll was not the election director during the Nov. 8 General Election nor during the Nov. 21 canvass.
Pinal County’s recount report reflected 507 more votes in the attorney general race compared to the official canvass and 502 more in the race for superintendent of public education.
Roll’s report, however, never addressed what the Pinal County’s counts would have been in other races had the county’s canvass included all the valid votes in the first place. But there were some close local races which raise questions of whether the hundreds of uncounted ballot would have changed the winner or have triggered a recount.
For example, the Town of Kearny’s Proposition 475, the Home Rule expenditure option, passed by only 212 votes without an unspecified number of ballots in Precinct 01 (Kearny) not being tabulated.
Meanwhile, Precinct 26 (Johnson Ranch), Precinct 68 (San Tan Park), and Precinct 109 (Florence Anthem) also had a large number of uncounted ballots, according to Roll. Those precincts included the Florence Unified School District race where voters were asked to elect two board members.
Similarly, ballots out of Precinct 15 (Saddlebrooke East) were also reported by Roll as being undercounted. Many voters there live within the boundaries of the Oracle Elementary School District which had a school board election on the ballot.
In a Dec. 29 supplemental report, Roll explained to the secretary of state’s office that “continued research and investigation” found 63 miscellaneous ballots with “unclear marks” were not properly sorted out for adjudication on Election Day due to another human error.
Adjudication is a process by which a bi-partisan panel reviews a ballot to see if a voter’s intent can be determined.
None of the votes on those 63 ballots were included in Pinal County’s canvass, but any votes cast on the ballots in the AG and Superintendent races were included in the recount, Roll reported.
Pinal County voters in several precincts cast votes in those two school board races, so only county elections officials know whether the Nov. 21 canvassed results would have a different outcome if the uncounted ballots had been correctly tabulated.
There is no mechanism in state law to change the canvassed results for races other than any which are subject to a mandatory recount. Nor is there a provision for conducting any informal recount.
But there is a growing call for Pinal County officials to announce what the correct vote counts would have been, and if any margin of victory would have narrowed enough to trigger a recount, even if just for informational purposes.
According to public records, Pinal County and its local political parties conducted a statutorily mandated hand count on Nov. 11. Then-Election Director Virginia Ross reported to the secretary of state that “no discrepancies were found” in the review of Precincts 27 and 52, the two precincts selected at random from the county’s 109 precincts for a hand count of Election Day ballots.
But had either Precinct 01, 15, 26, 68, or 109 been randomly chosen, it should have revealed a large number of valid ballots that were never counted. In turn, Ross would have been forced to address the discrepancy prior to referring a canvassing report to the board of supervisors.
The limited scale of Election Day hand counts brings renewed attention to an ongoing case at the Arizona Court of Appeals in which two of Cochise County’s three supervisors are pushing for authority to hand count more than just two Election Day polling places.
An appellate brief is due to the court by the Cochise County supervisors no later than Feb. 8.