Pima County, Ariz., is following in the footsteps of Maricopa County in its election issues as state and local officials call for investigations following the November election.

Pima, which includes the city of Tucson, is the second-most populous county in Arizona and appears to be mimicking the state’s largest county, Maricopa, regarding election problems and irregularities. State legislators and a county supervisor have called for investigations into Pima County’s handling of this year’s general election, but it seems neither local nor state authorities have decided to take them up on their requests.

Two Arizona state legislators announced last Monday that they had sent a letter to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), requesting an investigation into Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly’s administration of the 2024 general election. Cazares-Kelly is a registered Democrat.

In the letter, GOP Arizona State Representatives Teresa Martinez and Rachel Jones reference a county supervisor who had also called for an investigation into Cazares-Kelly. The supervisor wanted an investigation after Cazares-Kelly’s office shut down the early ballot request web portal about a week before the early voting deadline. However, the supervisor’s motion during a county Board of Supervisors meeting last month to seek an independent investigation into Cazares-Kelly failed.

“Reports indicate that nearly 4,000 voters were impacted,” the state legislators’ letter reads. “It is imperative to fully investigate the Recorder’s arbitrary decision to restrict ballot access in this manner and determine the extent to which voters were disenfranchised.”

“District boundary error”

The Pima County recorder’s office sent its Nov. 19 press release to Just the News on Thursday in response to a request for comment. The press release explains the reason for the recorder’s office shutting down the early ballot request portal.

“A district boundary error discovered by Pima County in the weeks before the 2024 General Election led to an unavoidable delay in our vendor’s printing and assembly of ballots,” according to the recorder’s office. “This delay caused concern, and despite assurances, many voters flooded the online form to request ballots. Some voters did so despite already being on the Active Early Voting List (AEVL). This duplicated their ballot requests.

“The processing of online ballot requests is still a very manual process in our office, requiring us to look up each voter record and review many pieces of information. Follow-up communication is often necessary. After monitoring the progress of the ballot requests during the week leading up to the October 25 deadline, it became clear that our office could not manually process all the online requests in a timely manner. Only 39% of the more than 20,000 ballot requests manually processed before October 19 were valid,” the recorder’s office continued.

Voting by convicted felons

“On October 19, after our data team filtered out about 4,000 duplicate requests, we emailed the remaining 3,900 voters with unique online Early Ballot requests.”

The legislators also note in their letter that they had written to Cazares-Kelly in June regarding “a reckless voter-registration inmate program” that she “essentially facilitated illegal voting by convicted felons.”

The Republican state representatives “demanded that she immediately put an end to the program” and “asked how many people have registered to vote through the inmate program since 2020 and if her office had completed any due diligence to confirm that persons who register through the program are actually eligible to vote under Arizona law.” However, they said they “received no response.”

The legislators added that they also wrote Cazares-Kelly in October “to express our constituents’ concerns over the Recorder’s Office’s processing, storage, and communications relating to undeliverable and returned ballots.”

The October letter noted that “It appears that in some cases when a ballot is returned as undeliverable, voters have received a notification stating, ‘We received your mailed ballot’ and ‘We are in the process of verifying your signature.’ This notification understandably causes confusion since an unvoted ballot that has not reached its intended recipient should not bear any signature on the affidavit appearing on the outside envelope.”

Mayes’ office told Just the News on Thursday in response to a request for comment, “The attorney general’s office has received the request from the representatives. However, I’ll have to decline to comment further. The attorney general’s office does not comment on potential investigations.”

Pima County has previously had election issues, including non-citizens on its voter rolls.

According to a February report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), Pima County has removed 186 non-citizens from its voter rolls since 2021, with the majority of those registered to vote through third parties.

Of the 186 non-citizen voters in Pima County, seven cast ballots across two federal and local elections. A total of 120 of the records, or approximately 65%, “came from ‘political parties and group drives,’” according to the information given to PILF by Pima County. The county data didn’t include which third-party drives registered the non-citizens. 

The year with the greatest amount of non-citizen voter records created in Pima County was 2022 at 132. The midterm election year of 2022 also had the highest number of non-citizen voters who cast ballots in the county, which was six in total during the general election.

Two weeks to count ballots

Following the 2022 midterm elections, Pima County election officials struggled to determine how to handle provisional ballots cast by unregistered voters, discrepant provisional ballot totals, and ballots cast by voters with old addresses — even asking the secretary of state’s office for guidance. The largest county in Arizona, Maricopa, has also had numerous election issues over the years, going back to at least 2012. 

This year, Maricopa County took nearly two weeks to count ballots in the November election, which Republicans criticized as being an avoidable issue.

However, Maricopa County will have a new Republican recorder next year, current Arizona Freedom Caucus member and state Rep. Justin Heap. The day after Election Day, Heap posted on X, explaining what his focus will be once he enters office.

“It is undeniably true that past elections, under both parties and spanning more than a decade, have denigrated our county’s reputation and made us the laughing stock of the nation. That ends today,” Heap wrote. “Throughout my campaign, I made my promises to restore trust in our elections and respect all voters an issue of paramount importance — and I intend to deliver on those promises.”

Reprinted with permission from Just The News by Natalia Middlestadt.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.