Tim Steller's column: Recorder's office wobbles under first presidential test

It’s Pima County’s first presidential election in 30 years under a recorder other than F. Ann Rodriguez.

Even the remnants of Rodriguez’s reign are gone: Most of her administration left after Gabriella Cázares-Kelly won the election in 2020 and began forming her own team, as one does.

Democrat Cázares-Kelly’s crew ran the 2022 midterm election successfully enough, but now, under the stress of a presidential election, we can see growing pains.

They’re especially evident in one key figure: 37%. That’s the turnout as of Monday afternoon, in terms of ballots processed, eight days before the election ends on Nov. 5.

In 2020, the figure at the same point in the election cycle was 52%, according to Uplift Campaigns, which tracks ballot returns. As of Monday, the processing was about 80,000 ballots behind where it was in 2020, Sam Almy of Uplift reported.

That can probably be traced to one early glitch. A last-minute effort to ensure that approximately 500 voters in the Continental School District area were going to get the right ballot led to a delay in mailing out about half the early ballots.

In previous years, Rodriguez’s office had sent all the ballots out in one batch. This year, Cázares-Kelly’s team sent them out in a series of batches. Three batches with about 267,000 ballots were delayed by the school-district issue.

When I called Rodriguez Tuesday, the old hand, who supported a different Democrat for the office in 2020, said of Cázares-Kelly: “What she has is a snowball effect.”

That effect became evident with the shutdown of the online portal for requesting early ballots on Oct. 19, which my colleague Charlie Borla revealed Thursday. Up until Oct. 19, about 28,000 voters had flooded the online portal, some of them simply impatient because they are on the early-voting list but had not received their ballots yet.

Marion Chubon, Cázares-Kelly’s chief deputy recorder, made the call to shut down the portal. Chubon, the third person to hold the job of chief deputy in this term, said she saw that requests via the online portal could not be fulfilled fast enough to comply with a law that says early ballots must be sent out within 48 hours, the Tucson Sentinel reported.

Instead, she had staff winnow the list down to only those who had not already been mailed a ballot — though it may not have arrived — and email them to tell them to call a phone number. It made sense bureaucratically, because the phone process took less time than using the online portal.

And they handled a massive number of calls the week of Oct. 20 — more than 8,000 last week.

But the truth is, adding two steps to a process that was supposed to be one step for the voter was a dangerous thing. The first step — noticing an email — is not to be assumed since we all get so much junk email, and not everyone checks their email regularly. The second step, phoning the recorder’s office, also took initiative.

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Chubon told the Sentinel that the office sent an email to 3,952 voters who had previously requested a ballot via the online portal. Between Monday and Friday, the office fulfilled 2,829 phone calls requesting early ballots.

So there was a group of around 1,123 voters who had requested an early ballot online, who may have been eligible to receive one, and who did not fulfill their online request by later calling the office.

They may still vote by going to an early-voting site, but they might not. This could be grounds for complaint or even part of the inevitable lawsuits that arise after the election.

It’s impossible to run an election perfectly, of course, but glitches and miscues matter more when so many people are closely watching. And Cázares-Kelly sometimes hurts herself more than she helps.

Earlier this 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.

The story seemed credible because of what the recorder’s office website showed. After Lewis interviewed the voter and lobbed allegations of wrongdoing, Cázares Kelly responded in a 12-tweet thread.

“Bro, not everything is a conspiracy,” it began.

She then explained 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 voted, when the truth was it had been returned undeliverable and unvoted.

“I’m tweeting about this non-story, because conspiracy theorists are fishing for outrage,” she wrote. “We’re working hard to keep 650K+ voters informed about their most fundamental rights as Americans. We’re following the law & providing info as a courtesy, not a statutory obligation.”

She ended by telling a list of four Tucson and Arizona reporters (not me, I hadn’t asked), “No … I’m not available for further comment.”

Which was a bit rude, I thought, especially considering that the day before she had posted, “Thank you to international journalists, but I’m currently prioritizing: Local, state, national then international (in that order).”

The election may turn out to be a success still, but each glitch in the process and self-indulgent communication makes it a bit harder.