A study released last week is raising new concerns that county elections officials across Arizona do not have the tools available to ensure accuracy in their records.
The America First Priority Institute (AFPI) recently completed a monthslong precinct-level analysis of 2022 General Election data obtained directly from six Arizona counties. The results published June 22 show some precincts reported more absentee, mail-in, and in-person ballots being counted than there were registered voters listed as casting ballots.
AFPI focused on data from Arizona’s four most populous counties –Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, and Yavapai– as well as Apache and Coconino which have significant tribal communities where concerns of voting irregularities had been raised in 2020.
“We made no attempt to determine if any discrepancies were intentional or accidental. How and for whom voters voted also were not at issue,” the report notes. “We were strictly looking to determine whether voters and vote totals were equal.”
According to the report, the six counties combined had 6,057 more ballots recorded as cast than there were registered voters listed as voting. In precincts where the reverse was true, 2,184 more registered voters were listed as voting than ballots shown as counted.
That resulted in an 8,241-vote discrepancy, or 0.36 percent of the total ballots counted. It is a difference nearly 30 times the margin of 280 votes by which a Maricopa County judge ruled in late December that Abe Hamadeh lost to Kris Mayes in the attorney general race.
AFPI’s report goes on to point out that some voters (i.e., police officers, judges, domestic violence victims) have their name and address hidden from voting reports. These “secured” or “protected” voters accounted for 4,078 voters who cast ballots in the 2022 General Election in the six counties, with 2,888 just in Maricopa County.
Yet even reducing the discrepancy by the number of purported protected voters, the report shows a difference of 2,200 votes. Well within a statistical probability that Hamadeh actually ended up with more votes than Mayes, according to the report’s “conservative estimates.”
AFPI decided to conduct a study after hearing of concerns that some ballots were counted more than once while other ballots were not counted at all during last November’s election.
The data was obtained directly from each of the six counties via public records requests. AFPI says it took six months to finally receive all of the records needed.
One problem with the analysis is that the records of who voted was not reliable, the report contends. This was due to the fact most counties did not archived their voter records as of Nov. 8 (Maricopa County did).
As result, if someone who voted in Apache County on Nov. 8 moved to another county before the list was prepared for AFPI, Apache County would not have access to that voter’s registration file and voting history.
It is a situation the report authors Dr. John Lott, Ph.D. and Steven M. Smith say is unacceptable in this day and age.
“Data storage is trivially inexpensive, and saving a file time-stamped on election day would be easy,” they noted. “Yet, amazingly, these election bureaus frequently claim they do not archive their data.”
Lott currently serves as president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, while Smith is AFPI’s Interim Chief Operating Officer and recently served as a Special Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House Office of American Innovation and the Domestic Policy Council.
The authors note that the finding of discrepancies should not be the end of the story.
“A technologically advanced and democratic society in the digital age should never face discrepancies in its election results or be in situations where more votes are counted than voters; votes counted should always equal the number of registered voters who voted,” they note.
The authors also say it is incumbent on elections officials to Identify discrepancies early in order to address issues from potential fraud to inaccurate recordkeeping.
One of the changes they support is for each Arizona county to prefile a discrepancy analysis that highlights the ratio of votes counted to registered voters who voted. This process, the report notes, should be done before certifying election results.
In addition, Lott and Smith support making more election result records open sourced and available for public inspection to “help restore confidence and trust in elections.”
It is time, the report argues, to modernize our election laws and bring vote counting into the 21st century.
“Doing so will ensure that all elections, especially close races like those experienced in the Arizona 2022 general election, are clear of discrepancies before election certification,” the report notes, adding that doing will “make it easy to vote but hard to cheat.”