At long last, the public is learning the Arizona election was a lot more questionable than anyone really knew. That information had been carefully buried. The worst part is that the Pinal County Board of Supervisors may have been deliberately misinformed. For crucial weeks after the 2022 general, they were deprived of “accurate information about the county’s botched tabulation.”
Election integrity questioned
As reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, mere days after the Board of Supervisors for Pinal County abdicated their election duties to the County Recorder, the world learned they had been treated like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed nothing but bullsh!t.
The outcomes can’t be questioned now but could have then. If anybody knew about what happened. One report specifically notes the county’s canvass “was filed prior to taking an adequate opportunity to investigate any possible anomalies we could discern from polling place returns.” Neither “the report nor its existence were made known to Hamadeh or the Mohave County judge preparing for the evidentiary trial in the Attorney General election challenge.”
Pinal county encompasses the traditionally conservative and predominantly Mormon area to the north of Tucson and east of Phoenix. From now on, their recorder, currently Dana Lewis, will “take on the bulk of Pinal County’s election administration following the supervisors’ July 5 vote.”
????????BREAKING????????
Who knew what and when? Pinal County certified a compromised election.
Instead of letting the court know of the issues, Pinal County and Katie Hobbs covered it up until after trial. Democracy dies in darkness so they say…https://t.co/c6OsIMlKuS
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) July 17, 2023
Once that was out of the way and the board members were safe, “the vote was followed the next week by the release of public records that show who in Pinal County knew what.”
More importantly, it shows “who was initially kept in the dark.” It turns out that “hundreds of ballots were not properly tabulated prior to the supervisors voting last November to canvass the election results.”
That matters because despite their denials, they had a week to fix it. If they had known. The outlet pieced together a helpful but somewhat confusing timeline detailing the crime like a postmortem.
Starting with a shake-up
The Primary Election for Arizona in 2022 is described as “disastrous.” as August rolled around, Virginia Ross stepped down from her elected job as County Recorder to accept a “contract that paid her $175,000 to serve as the county’s elections director.” Not bad for only four month’s work.
The move was needed, as Board Chairman Jeffrey McClure noted at the time, since it was “vital that we restore trust with Pinal County voters.” Ross had his glowing endorsement for the job.
The General Election was held November 8. The next day, McClure was patting the whole team on the back because “things were ‘light years‘ better than in August.” Supervisor Mike Goodman was “pretty confident that we have put back in the confidence of our voters here in Pinal County.” They were both wrong.
Read and share.
Turns out the problems aren’t only in Maricopa County.
To Voters in Pinal County, many votes were not counted and officials don’t care.
We the people demand fair and honest elections! https://t.co/Oc5n16o9Fw
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) July 17, 2023
By November 16, people started asking questions. That’s when people started talking about “a few dozen longtime voters forced to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day.” There were actually hundreds.
When the Board of Supervisors met to certify, or “canvass” the election, they didn’t have the full story. They were told only about “a problem on November 8 that delayed about 100 voters from checking in at their polling places.” County Attorney Kent Volkmer swore up and down the numbers were accurate other than that and such a small discrepancy wouldn’t matter enough to make a difference.
When people questioned him over “rumors” swirling around, he promised to follow up on that later and that was the end of it. After the four month contract for Ross expired, and after she got a $25,000 bonus upon the canvass vote, Geraldine Roll discovered “the problem with Election Day voter sign-in was more serious than first described.“
