The Pinal County election's director's resignation email was such a classic of the genre that it was possible to miss the meat of her complaint.
Addressed to County Manager Leo Lew, elections director Geraldine Roll's Tuesday note began like this: "Leo: With no regrets, I quit."
It ended, "Really, Not Respectfully, Geraldine Roll."
Geraldine Roll, the elections director in Pinal County, resigned with an angry letter to County Manager Leo Lew on June 27, 2023.
Those are words all of us would probably have liked to write at some point in our work lives. But the important words for our democracy were in between. There, she underlined the problems that have been cropping up especially in Republican-controlled counties around the state, where activists and officials keep forcing elections officials out through harassment and conspiracy-mongering.
"I have watched as you idly stood by when I was attacked," she wrote to Lew. "I cannot work for an individual who does not support me. The environment fostered by your team and the Board of Supervisors is toxic."
"I believe the Elections Department should not be politicized," she went on. "It is a far reach to see how you will deliver clean elections when you bend to a faction of the Republican party. Clearly, politics are the value this administration desires in a place where politics have no place: elections administration."
In a statement, Lew said he disagrees with her assessment. And in fact, it is hard to see from the outside what precisely prompted Roll's reaction. There was a conflict over GPS trackers for ballot boxes at the June 21 supervisors meeting, but it was not excessively hostile. Roll did not respond to a request for further comment.
Still, it's important to note she is the third elections director in a Republican-controlled Arizona county to resign in the last year after similar complaints of political interference or harassment.
Republican in a GOP county quits
In Arizona, the county recorders are elected and their duties include registering voters, sending out mail-in ballots and verifying the signature of those ballots mailed back. The elections directors are hired by the counties and handle election-day balloting as well as counting votes.
Last year, in the runup to the 2022 midterm election, both the county recorder and the elections director in Yavapai County stepped down, citing "nastiness" from the public.
“A lot of it is the nastiness that we have dealt with,” then-Yavapai County Recorder Leslie Hoffman told the Associated Press last year. “I’m a Republican recorder living in a Republican county where the candidate that they wanted to win won by 2-to-1 in this county and still getting grief, and so is my staff.”
The county's elections director, Lynn Constabile, left for much the same reasons, after 18 years on the job.
The situation in Cochise County has been even more drawn out and troubling. Last October, the two GOP members of the three-member board of supervisors tried to force a complete hand-count of the general election, responding to calls from the right wing that hand counts are the answer to fears of a manipulated machine count, even though machine counts are more accurate.
The Cochise County Attorney said such a count would be illegal, and elections director Lisa Marra refused to proceed with it. The two Republicans on the board of supervisors, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, then sued Marra in her professional and personal capacities. They withdrew their lawsuit a few days later.
Marra, a respected 5-year veteran of the job, resigned in January and filed a legal claim with the county, saying that the supervisors were parroting conspiracy theories and putting her at risk. She won a $130,000 settlement in May.
In the meantime, Cochise County hired a new elections director, but lost the other two staff members in the department, one to a retirement, and the other to a resignation. It's questionable how things will go in next year's general election with the same conspiracist supervisors still in the majority.
Pinal's election problems
Pinal County is arguably in more desperate need of steady leadership on elections than either of these two counties. A flawed 2022 primary election caused concern and led to the hiring of an emergency interim director, but was followed by a flubbed general election in November. Hundreds of ballots went uncounted, and the counts were not properly reconciled.
As documented by the publication VoteBeat May 5, the woman brought in on an emergency basis, Virginia Ross, had failed and fled before the problems were discovered.
So there is reason to watch carefully how elections are run in the county to Tucson's north. But there is equal need to let a competent official put her hands under the hood and make things work.
Leading Republicans in the county have been turning against Roll in recent weeks. In a June 21 email, obtained and published by VoteBeat, Pinal County GOP chair Belinda Rodriguez questioned Roll's competence and warned the supervisors — all five of whom are Republicans — she could put their jobs at risk.
"YOU, the Board of Supervisors can’t afford another botched election," she wrote. "There were people who asked publicly for your resignation in the last primary fiasco. I know they will DEMAND your resignation if you allow this to happen again."
At the June 21 Pinal County supervisors meeting, GOP activists, including Rodriguez, questioned why Roll had unilaterally decided to end a contract with a company that provided GPS trackers for ballot containers.
She explained that the county's leased trackers were attached to the "cages" that contained the ballot boxes, not on the boxes themselves, and therefore did not track the actual ballot boxes in transit once the boxes were removed from the cages.
"I want to know where the ballots are, so we’ve looked at other tracking devices, and they’re going to be far more effective because we can put them on the ballot boxes, and they’re going to be substantially less expensive, plus we can own them."
More GOP activists stepped up to slam Roll at the meeting for acting unilaterally on the GPS question. One, a woman from the town of Maricopa, warned the supervisors, "You guys work for us, not for anybody else. We're the ones who voted you in, and we can take you out — I don't mean that in a violent way."
So while it's unclear exactly what Lew, the county manager, failed to protect Roll from, it's clear that the supervisors were all being pressured by their party to tighten her leash.
That's the danger in these counties where Donald Trump's false claims that he was robbed of re-election have resonated strongly down to today. Some will always claim that they are being wronged by the election processes. And the supervisors in these counties have to acknowledge the complaints or risk their futures.
Bowing to the whims of the extremists is no way to run an election.
