Pima County reported incorrect numbers of uncounted ballots on Friday, due to what county officials say was a clerical error.
The error didn’t become public until an attorney for Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake complained.
The estimated number of uncounted ballots reported by the county went up in a two-hour period Friday, Lake’s attorney Jennifer Wright pointed out in a letter to county officials.
“Kari Lake for Arizona demands that Pima County provide an immediate explanation of the discrepancies in the numbers combined with complete and accurate accounting of how the number of uncounted ballots increased between the 1:23 p.m. report and the 3:23 p.m. report,’’ she wrote to Daniel Jurkowitz, the assistant chief civil deputy in the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
That’s not the only issue.
“Even more strange than the number of uncounted ballots increasing, at one point, the report purported to be uploaded at 3:23 p.m. was initially identical to the report uploaded at 1:23 p.m.,’’ she wrote. It was only about two hours later, Wright said, that the numbers in the report were changed without changing the time stamp.
Those figures have led to criticism on X, formerly Twitter, by Lake’s campaign, which posted: “We should know what the static number of ballots to count is. Instead, it’s like an accordion.’’
“It’s a clerical error,’’ Mark Evans, a spokesman for Pima County, said Saturday.
“It’s an easy explanation,’’ he said. “But in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into ‘inserted votes’.’’
Evans said the posting error was due to the fact that the number of issues that went to voters required that the ballot be broken into two separate cards.
In some cases, he said, not every voter returned both cards. So the number of cards being counted isn’t always double the number of ballots.
What happened here is related to that two-card issue, Evans said.
“When we reported the numbers to the secretary of state we read the wrong line,’’ he said. “We reported the number of cards we had counted rather than the number of ballots we had counted. So we reported we had counted 30,687, but that was the number of cards.”
By contrast, he said, the number of ballots actually counted was 15,492.
“So when we caught it, Constance (Hargrove, the county’s elections director) asked staff to correct it when they reported the second batch of results,’’ Evans said. That new tally — the one at 3:23 p.m. — also included a smaller batch that had since been processed.
‘Show me your work’
Wright said she’s willing to give the county the benefit of the doubt. But she said no one from the county has yet responded to her inquiry or provided her any details about how the number of uncounted ballots suddenly increased by 14,666.
“Show me your work,’’ Wright said.
She now is seeking detailed numbers from the county breakdown of ballots waiting to be tabulated, broken down by categories including how many are waiting to be processed, how many are waiting for signature verification and how many need to be “cured.’’
That refers to situations where the signature on early ballot envelopes appears to not match other signatures the county recorder already has on file from that person. Arizona law gives five days — through Sunday, Nov. 10 this year — for individuals to contact the office and cure the ballots, verifying that they did, in fact, come from them.
“It’s really important in our election systems and processes that we have transparency and accountability and the numbers add up,’’ Wright said. “And that’s how you restore confidence and trust in our electoral system.’’
What it comes down to, she said, is getting “clear answers.’’
“If there’s a clear explanation that resolves the concern, I’ll check that out,’’ Wright said. “I hope that there’s a clear, innocent explanation so I can put this issue aside. People deserve answers.”
Lake’s status, history
Lake is trailing Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego in the race to be elected Arizona’s next senator.
Gallego was ahead Saturday by 33,898 votes out of more than 2.7 million ballots already tallied, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
Separate reports showed there were still more than 588,000 ballots uncounted statewide. While the lion’s share is in Maricopa County at about 337,000, the most recent report still showed 120,907 uncounted in Pima County.
Those uncounted Pima ballots won’t sway the heavily Democratic county Lake’s way. The last report showed Gallego with about a 90,000-vote lead over Lake in Pima County.
Lake also is trailing in Maricopa County by about 60,000 votes.
But her campaign is counting on picking up enough votes in both counties which, combined with strong showings for her in many rural counties, could provide the margin of victory.
On top of that, Lake and her allies in the Republican Party are out looking for people they believed voted for her who are on the “cure’’ list to see if they can bolster her numbers by the Sunday deadline.
Lake has already spent two years in court challenging the final tally in the 2022 election when she lost the governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Last time, the focus was on Maricopa County.
One case only came to an end Thursday when the Arizona Supreme Court dismissed her final appeal. Lake also has other active litigation continuing over her 2022 loss.
Pima County voters received a two-page ballot. County officials say an error in reporting the number of uncounted ballots occurred Friday because of the two-card ballot.
