What Pima County officials say was a clerical error led it to reporting incorrect numbers of untallied ballots on Friday.
But it took a complaint by an attorney for Republican Senate hopeful Kari Lake to make it public.
In a letter to county officials, Jennifer Wright pointed out that the estimated number of uncounted ballots reported by the county actually went up in a two-hour period on Friday.
“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 report were changed without changing the time stamp.
Those figures have led to criticism on X by Lake’s campaign.
“We should know what the static number of ballots to count is,” the post reads. “Instead, it’s like an accordion.”
“It’s a clerical error,”said Mark Evans, a spokesman for the county.
“It’s an easy explanation,” he said. “But in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”
Wright told Capitol Media Services 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 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 – for individuals to contact the office and cure the ballots, verifying that they did, in fact, come from them.
“I think that 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.
Evans said the posting error is 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, said Evans, is related to that two-card issue.
“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,” Evans said. “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. And that new tally – the one at 3:23 p.m. – also included a smaller batch that had since been processed.
Wright said she’s still waiting for an answer from the county.
“People are pointing this out to me and it’s not adding up to me, either,” she said
“I hope that there’s a clear, innocent explanation so I can put this issue aside,” Wright said. “People deserve answers. It’s just transparency.”
The desire to verify the numbers comes as Lake is trailing in her bid to be elected Arizona’s next senator.
Reports from the Secretary of State’s Office on Saturday showed Lake trailing Democrat Ruben Gallego by 33,898 votes out of more than 2.7 million ballots already tallied.
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 in Pima County.
Those uncounted Pima ballots won’t sway the heavily Democratic county her way. That last report showed Gallego with about a 90,000 vote lead over Lake.
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 on that “cure” list to see if they can bolster her numbers by the Sunday deadline.
What remains to be seen is whether what happened with the numbers in Pima County could provide the basis for Lake, who spent two years challenging her 2022 loss in the gubernatorial race to Katie Hobbs, to mount another legal challenge if she loses this race.
Last time, however, the focus was on Maricopa County.
Lake filed a 70 page lawsuit after that 2022 race alleging that “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election.” She also claimed that Election Day problems the county had with its printers and tabulators at vote centers “could not have occurred absent intentional misconduct.”
That case took two years to resolve, only coming to an end when the Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed her final appeal.
Lake, however, also has other active litigation: A lawsuit filed against her by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer that stems from false allegations she made about his role in that 2022 loss.
Lake made repeated statements that Richer inserted 300,000 “illegal,” “invalid,” “phony” or ”bogus” ballots into the vote count. That was based on Lake’s claim about disparities between preliminary and final counts of ballots dropped off on Election Day, ballots she argued were not within the legal chain of custody.
The other basis for the lawsuit was Lake’s claim that Richer – along with Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates – “sabotaged election day.”
One post by her campaign, for example, said the pair “knew 75% of Kari Lake’s voters would show up on game day, so they programmed the machines to print 19-inch images on 20-inch ballots.” The claim was that the mis-sized ballots created election day problems and long lines, all of which resulted in some voters – Lake argued they were her supporters – leaving before casting a ballot.
Lake admitted in court filings earlier this year that everything Richer said she did in his complaint was true. What remains before the court is the question of financial damages.
But Lake, in a video explaining her decision, insisted it had nothing to do with conceding that her statements were wrong – even though her court papers admit that they were.
Instead, she said it was a strategic move allowing her to focus her attention on her Senate campaign. And Lake said Richer and his attorneys were trying to tie her time up in lawsuits and keep her off the campaign trail.
“It’s called lawfare; weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish and destroy political opponents,” Lake said. “We’ve all seen how they’re doing it to President Trump. And here in Arizona, they’re doing the exact same thing to me.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
