Tucson-area lawmakers ask state AG to probe Pima County election issues

Two Republican state lawmakers from the Tucson area seek an investigation into the pre-Election Day shutdown of an online portal Pima County voters used to request an early ballot.

Teresa Martinez and Rachel Jones, state representatives from Districts 16 and 17, respectively, say an investigation into the Pima County Recorder’s Office portal shutdown “is imperative,” the pair wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.

A request for a similar probe by Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy was nixed by his colleagues about two weeks ago.

The portal incident is rooted in a last-minute effort to ensure that approximately 500 voters in Continental School District were going to get the correct ballot. That led to a delay in mailing out about half the early ballots in the county.

The delay prompted some voters to “panic,” Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly previously told Supervisors when she explained the situation to the board. Some 28,000 voters flooded the online portal seeking early mail ballots up until about Oct. 19. The office then closed the portal after it was clear requests could not be filled fast enough to comply with a state-required deadline.

Martinez and Jones say Mayes needs to investigate the Recorder’s Office’s decision to shut down the portal six days before the deadline to request an early ballot because news reports “indicate that nearly 4,000 voters were impacted.”

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But an investigation is also needed, they wrote, for two other reasons: they say, “Cázares-Kelly has essentially facilitated illegal voting by convicted felons through a reckless voter-registration program.” Jones, joined by outgoing state lawmakers Justine Wadsack and Cory McGarr, received no response from a June 5 letter to Cázares-Kelly seeking information about the program, Martinez and Jones say in their letter.

The two lawmakers also cited the need to “to express our constituents’ concerns ... relating to undeliverable and returned ballots,” an issue Jones and McGarr wrote to Cázares-Kelly about on Oct. 24. The lawmakers said then that there were instances in which some voters received a notification that the Recorder’s Office had received a ballot and were verifying their signature, when the ballot was returned as undeliverable.

Earlier that month local conservative-radio host Garret Lewis aired claims from a woman who had moved out of Pima County that someone ordered an early ballot in her name then voted and returned it. The recorder’s office website, which allows voters to check their ballot’s status, said the ballot was in “signature verification” stage and asked the voter to call.

Two days prior to the lawmakers’ letter, Cázares-Kelly responded in a 12-tweet thread, saying that the office had received two calls about this problem and fixed the wording on the website so that it did not appear that the ballot had been returned and counted when it had actually been returned as undeliverable, the Star’s Tim Steller explained in a recent column.

“Arizonans deserve free, fair and transparent elections. In light of your recent decision to immediately investigate President-Elect Donald Trump over his speech,” the lawmakers wrote, referring to Trump’s comments on Liz Cheney in Phoenix, “we hope you will agree that Recorder Cázares-Kelly’s alarming conduct administering the 2024 General Election warrants a thorough investigation.”