Cochise County elections director resigns after protecting midterm ballots from Republican officials
Lisa Marra, the Cochise County elections director who refused to cooperate with an illegal hand count plan, describes a threatening work environment, both physically and emotionally, and says she was publicly disparaged in her resignation letter to county. Read more»
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Despite months of preparation for the 2022 midterms, Maricopa County couldn’t pull off a perfectly smooth election and other Arizona counties made headlines for their election woes as well, but there are lessons that could enable officials to make Arizona elections stronger. Read more»
Pinal County’s outgoing elections director collected a $25,000 bonus for running a smooth election despite reporting final results with significant inaccuracies, including around 500 uncounted votes in the neck-and-neck attorney general race. Read more»
After hearing a hodgepodge of claims from three losing GOP candidates alleging inaccuracies in the midterm election, Arizona judges rejected many of the most far-reaching and unsubstantiated claims, but are allowing other claims to move forward. Read more»
As Maricopa County investigates what exactly caused machines to reject thousands of voters’ ballots on Election Day, an analysis of technical evidence found that local officials may have pushed the county’s ballot printers past their limits. Read more»
Arizona officials certified the state’s election results after a month of challenges to the certification process - but now it kicks off the five-day period in which lawsuits challenging the results can be filed in court and a long timeline for three statewide recounts. Read more»
Across Arizona, from Maricopa south to Cochise and north to Mohave counties, the counties’ supervisors — mostly Republicans — have faced pressure for weeks to reject the election results - but in all but one county, the supervisors followed state law and voted to certify their election. Read more»
Amid a GOP campaign to pressure county supervisors across Arizona not to certify their elections, two counties have postponed their vote until the eleventh hour, raising questions about what happens if they fail to meet their deadline to finalize results. Read more»
After widespread printer problems in Maricopa County on Election Day, the ballots of 146 county voters - from voters who checked in at an initial vote center and received a ballot but left, potentially without casting that ballot - are in limbo, and potentially will not be counted. Read more»
Cochise County Republican Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd are suing the county’s elections director, Lisa Marra, asking a judge to order her to give access to midterm election ballots so the county recorder can conduct an expanded hand count audit. Read more»
Maricopa County saw widespread problems tabulating ballots on Election Day, and while all voters were still able to cast ballots, answers are still emerging about what happened. Read more»
Two main differences explain why Florida posted the majority of election results by the end of Election Night and Arizona didn't: Florida didn’t have an avalanche of mail ballots on Election Day and Florida counties has in-house scanners that process the ballot envelopes. Read more»
Roughly 17,000 Maricopa County voters on Tuesday were unable to watch machines tabulate their ballots on-site because of a widespread printing problem that caused the on-site machines to reject the ballots - but officials have reassured those voters that their ballots will be counted. Read more»
The machines that tabulate ballots at Maricopa County vote centers had widespread problems during much of Election Day, with about 20% of locations affected. Shortly after 2p.m., Maricopa County election officials said they had found the cause and were resolving the issue. Read more»
A judge ruled that Cochise County cannot conduct a hand count of all ballots cast in the midterm election - saying that it is not legal in Arizona - blocking the latest effort by GOP leaders to hand-count ballots, a method experts say is slower and less accurate than machine counts. Read more»
Advocates want Apache County to create vote centers where anyone can vote to address the pattern of ballot rejections among Navajo Nation voters in Arizona, where the complexity of mapping out reservation addresses and the lack of voter education creates confusion. Read more»