The third-largest county in Arizona is blaming human error and poorly-trained staff for the hundreds of additional votes it found during a state-mandated recount, which narrowed the already close race for state attorney general.
In a meeting Wednesday morning, Pinal county officials laid out various human errors and training lapses that led to a discrepancy of more than 500 votes between the canvassed results and the recounted totals. The initial count was off by 0.3% from the recounted results, the county said.
The errors included not tabulating ballots that should’ve been counted because of problems with poll workers checking in voters on Election Day and not double-checking ballots flagged by machines for further review.
“We made mistakes. There’s no two ways about it,” county attorney Kent Volkmer told the county’s board of supervisors on Wednesday. “Fortunately, it did not result in anybody’s election being changed.”
Volkmer said he is now confident that the recounted totals are correct.
“It took us a second try,” he said. “And a third try, quite frankly, with the day-of ballots. We have very thoroughly examined why this happened. And we’re taking every step we can to ensure that it does not happen again.”
Until last year, statewide recounts in Arizona were rare, but a new state law that went into effect in September 2022 increased the margin for automatic recounts, sending two statewide races to them.
It’s not unusual for recounted vote totals to differ from initial counts by a few votes, barely affecting the total and hardly ever changing the winner. But Pinal’s different totals is an outlier.
The changes most dramatically affected the attorney general race between Democrat Kris Mayes and Republican Abe Hamadeh. Mayes won the election, but her lead narrowed to just 280 votes after the recount, down from 511.
Hamadeh is now seeking a new trial to contest his loss. The large difference between the vote totals in Pinal county has led some Republicans to call for further counting in other counties, where discrepancies were nowhere near as big as Pinal’s.
The meeting of the county’s board of supervisors followed a public report that detailed the counting problems for day-of ballots, which include:
Some provisional ballots were not counted correctly.
Some polling electronic poll pads would not scan voters’ driver’s licenses, so some voters cast ballots without being formally checked in.
Paper jams in tabulation may not have been interpreted correctly, leading to miscounts.
Ballots with unclear marks weren’t adjudicated and counted in some cases.
A tabulation team in one case didn’t sort through ballots that were flagged for not being processed by the machine, leading to a stack of ballots that weren’t counted.
The county attributed the issues to “human error” largely caused by training lapses, not machine problems or any outside interference.
The problems during the general election come after different woes plagued the primary election in Pinal county. In the primary, some precincts ran out of ballots, causing long waits for voters, some of whom did not end up voting.
After the primary, the county fired its new elections director, David Frisk, and replaced him with the county recorder, Virginia Ross. The amount of staff and election spending increased under Ross, though long-standing issues with turnover, funding and a lack of institutional knowledge couldn’t be fully cured in the short time between the August primary and November general election.
Another new elections director, Geraldine Roll, is now in place, as Ross was only tapped to run last year’s election. Roll is the county’s fifth elections director since 2020. Ross received a $25,000 (£20,730) bonus for completing the general election successfully.
Roll told the supervisors she found “absolutely no evidence” of anything nefarious with the vote count, but that she believed the canvass of results was done “prematurely”.
“I think we had enough to have raised a few questions and we should have taken more steps before we canvassed, and we certainly had time,” Roll said. Ross was in charge of the department at the time of the canvass in November.
Roll, now tasked with leading the department after yet another problem election, said she will be compiling an internal procedures manual to ensure that all employees and poll workers know how to complete their tasks accurately and thoroughly. The manual, Volkmer said, will help address the gaps in institutional knowledge in the department.
While the vote count was off, board of supervisors chairman Jeff Serdy noted, “every vote got counted”.
