It could be three days after the polls closed before all the ballots in Tuesday’s election are counted, Pima County elections officials say.
One issue that continues to slow the process is the number of mail-in ballots that were instead returned to early voting locations and polling places, said Pima County Elections Department Director Brad Nelson.
His office delivered some 16,000 ballots to the Pima County Recorder’s Office on Wednesday morning so they could be validated, a process that has to be completed before the ballot can be counted.
Also, about 3,800 provisional ballots, which can include those given to people who lost their mail-in ballot, had inconsistent address information or similar issues.
Meanwhile, problems with the new election software led to the department listing the incorrect number of precincts reporting results as well as the number of registered voters in the county.
Nelson said the number of eligible Pima County voters was initially listed at more than 560,000. The actual number is about 492,000, he estimated.
The software glitch was not discovered until the system started counting ballots from polling places, he said. A bug in the operating system immediately reported that all the county precincts had been counted.
Nelson said multiple tests of the new system prior to election night were accurate. And he said the vote count remained accurate.
The county is working with the software vendor, who was at the elections office on Wednesday, to fix the issue.
One possible explanation for the inaccurate count of registered voters, he said, would be that the elections office was supplied a number that included both active and inactive registered voters.
He said the equipment will be retested once all the ballots have been counted, likely after Saturday’s planned hand count.
The head of the Pima County Republican Party, Bill Beard, says he is tired of hearing of problems counting ballots every election cycle.
Beard, who ran unsuccessfully against Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez in 2014, said the continuing problem is one of the reasons he chose to run for office.
The most high-profile issue for the department may have been during the May 2006 Regional Transportation Authority bond election. In it, the state Attorney General’s Office investigated allegations of vote tampering.
An audit of the ballots conducted in 2009 by then-Attorney General Terry Goddard confirmed the 60-40 margin of victory, although critics still question the findings.
Other issues involving the elections department include the discovery of an uncounted box of ballots a week after the November 2014 general election.
And several days ago, a Pima County Election Department worker violated office protocol and broke a seal on one of the counting machines. That required the department to re-certify the machine and generated criticism of the office by critics and observers.
With so many examples of problems in the election department over the years, Beard said, county officials should have redoubled efforts to ensure a smooth night.
