Pinal County’s election meltdown has brought more focus on an important post-Election Day activity that is not being held in some counties due to a lack of participation by local political parties.
According to state law, a limited hand count of early ballots and polling place ballots is to be conducted in every county after each countywide primary, special, general, and presidential preference election. The purpose is to compare the results of each county’s machine-tabulated count to the manual hand count to assure each county’s tabulation equipment accurately counted votes.
However, a county’s elections director cannot conduct a hand count audit unless the county chair of each recognized political party on the ballot designates that party’s participants. If the names are not provided prior to Election Day, no hand count is permitted under state law.
Public records show three counties were unable to perform a hand count of the 2022 General Election due to one or two of the local parties not fulfilling their statutory duties.
Those counties were Apache, Graham, and La Paz. Similarly, all three counties notified the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office last month that they did not get the full involvement of two parties to conduct a hand count of the court-ordered statewide recount.
As Arizona Daily Independent reported after the 2020 General Election, many of Arizona’s county elections directors have had problems getting their local political parties to participate with the hand counts.
Attention Drawn To Lack Of County Election Audits By Political Parties
Part of the problem, according to frustrated elections officials and election integrity supporters, is that there is no penalty or consequence for local party committees or state party chairs for failing to participate in the hand count.
“Arizona needs party leaders who will do their jobs and this is obviously a critical part of it,” said Constantin Querard, a Republican consultant who has been heavily involved in the Arizona Republican Party for much of the last two decades.
Querard was astounded that, after the events of 2020, any Republican county organization would have failed to provide the personnel required to ensure accurate counts in 2022.
“The law as written also should be changed, because right now either party could thwart the process by not sending volunteers, and the process shouldn’t be held hostage by either party. The public deserves these hand counts.”
Querard suggested that the law could be changed so that County Recorders, in the event of a no-show by one or both parties, could hire voters who are registered in the required parties, to conduct the hand counts. “Then send the bill to the County Party organizations to pay. That will incentivize them to provide volunteers the next time.”
If the necessary party participants are timely designated in advance and show up as scheduled, then the hand count must begin within 24 hours after the polls close on Election Day. This can be done by “beginning” the process by randomly selecting the precincts or voting centers to be audited, and then completing the counting in one sitting or the participants can reconvene at a later date.
A county’s hand count must be completed before the county board can canvass. The number of ballots and precincts which are involved in the hand count are determined by state law.
It is also state law which determines whether a hand count result in a county is within the “designated margin” of the electronic count for the sampled ballots. The current margin of difference for both early ballots and polling place ballots is 3 votes or 1 percent, which is greater.
If the two counts are within the margin, then the electronic results are deemed the official results of the election and are reported to the county’s board of supervisors for canvassing. However, if the hand count results are outside the designated margin, a second “follow up” hand count of the same ballots is required.
This can potentially lead to an expanded hand count and even a jurisdiction-wide hand count if the results are still beyond the acceptable margin.
No county has ever reported needing to conduct an expanded hand count. Critics contend the reason is that too few ballots from too few Election Day polling places are included in the process.
In Pinal County, there were no problems revealed in the hand count of the two precincts randomly selected out of the county’s 109 precincts. However, five other precincts had widespread tabulation problems which would have been revealed if just one of those precincts had been selected.