Jen Fifield, Votebeat

When the Cochise County supervisors sat down to talk about elections in August, they were well aware of what happened the last time the county’s leaders tried to test the limits of state law.

The rural Arizona county on the Mexican border is where, during the 2022 midterm election, two Republicans on the Board of Supervisors devised a plan to ditch the machines used for elections and instead hand-count votes, before a judge foiled their plan. They then delayed the vote to finalize the county’s results until the same judge ordered them to certify them.

Supervisor Tom Crosby, who was re-elected last year, is awaiting a criminal trial on charges related to his actions during that election. And the county’s two new supervisors, also both Republicans, know his story well, and have been warned by the secretary of state about the election rules they must follow.

Nonetheless, at an Aug. 5 meeting, Supervisor Frank Antenori said the board needs to test the state’s laws once again, to see if supervisors really are obligated to use machines to tally votes, and whether they really have a non-discretionary duty to certify results. And Supervisor Kathleen Gomez said that if she had been in office in 2024, she wouldn’t have certified the county’s election results because of problems that occurred while counting ballots.

“I think we have to put this back in play in the courts,” Antenori said about supervisors’ duty to certify elections. “We have to make a case to go fight this again, or get the Legislature to change the statute.”

With another midterm election nearing, the supervisors are all but vowing to test the boundaries of state election laws that are meant to ensure accurate, secure, and timely election results. Hand-counting ballots has been proven in multiple studies and trials to be less accurate and take more time. And certification deadlines, if breached, could disrupt the transfer of power at all levels of government, from local to federal offices.

The false claims of election fraud have slowed in Arizona since Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, but the conversation among the supervisors last month, and several others earlier this year, are an indication of how Trump’s prior claims continue to influence how Arizona’s elections are perceived and run, and how they could lead to future challenges to results in 2026 and beyond.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was invited to present at the supervisors’ August meeting, but didn’t go after seeing he was being asked to present alongside someone who had encouraged the supervisors in 2022 to block the certification of the midterm results, according to documents obtained by Votebeat through a public records request.

After the meeting, his communications director, Aaron Thacker, told Votebeat that there is no debate about what the law requires the supervisors to do. And he said that the repeated attempts to question certified election systems in Arizona, particularly in smaller counties, “do more to undermine public confidence than to address any real issue.”

Hearing 2022 claims repeated at supervisors meeting

The goal of the August meeting, Antenori wrote in his invitation to Fontes, was to “ensure transparency, build voter confidence, and evaluate the proper processes for verifying machine integrity.”

The other invited speaker was Paul Rice, a Phoenix resident with no formal experience in elections but who was previously involved in a court case challenging the state’s use of the machines that tally votes, including ballot-marking devices and tabulators. Rice has been lobbying Cochise supervisors to get rid of the machines since 2022.

His major claim is that the laboratories that certified the state’s voting systems in the leadup to the 2022 election were not properly accredited. That claim is part of what Crosby and former Supervisor Peggy Judd said prompted their hesitation over certification.

At the time, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent the supervisors an explanation from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission about how the labs were properly accredited. But supervisors still delayed their vote, demanding to hear from Rice and Hobbs in person. That never happened, and the judge forced them to certify before the state’s deadline.

Rice accepted the invitation to the August meeting and talked for about 45 minutes, without other public comment allowed or any rebuttal from the County Attorney’s Office. He repeated his claim about the lab accreditation, and said he didn’t believe the county had to use the machines. He also said the law on certification wasn’t clear.

Rice repeated an argument that Crosby has attempted to make in his criminal case: that state law mandates that supervisors “canvass” results, but does mandate that they “certify” them. He said he believes canvassing just means reviewing the vote totals — not signing off on them.

Thacker, Fontes’ spokesman, disputed Rice’s claims in a response to Votebeat. He pointed to a sentence in state law that says electronic tabulation equipment must be used to count ballots. And he said that courts have made it clear that the only authorized hand count under state law is a post-election audit, which examines votes cast on a limited number of ballots.

On canvassing vs. certifying, Thacker said Rice’s claim is semantic and there is no legitimate debate about it.

“In Arizona law, the canvass is the process by which the election results are reviewed and officially confirmed — it is the act of certification,” Thacker wrote in an email.

Ali Morse, a Cochise County resident who helped lead a response in opposition to the supervisors’ 2022 actions, said she experienced déjà vu watching Rice’s presentation.

“The Board’s work session, in fact, appeared to be an attempt to amplify Supervisor Crosby’s dubious justification for unlawfully refusing to certify/canvass our 2022 general election which catapulted Crosby into his current mess of legal and financial problems,” Morse wrote in a letter to the editor published in a local paper, The Herald Review.

Jenny Guzman, program director of Common Cause Arizona said the misinformation given at the meeting is dangerous.

“It’s really important for people in government, especially county supervisors and people in other elected offices, to really remember that sometimes they are the only line of communication to voters,” Guzman said. “They need to make sure they aren’t providing any sort of information that isn’t accurate.”

New supervisors preparing to hand count ballots

The conversation was the latest in a long string of attempts by the new supervisors to signal to constituents who are concerned about election integrity that they are listening.

In a February conversation about elections, the supervisors said they eventually want to get to a place where they can hand count ballots. That means first going back to precinct-style voting, where voters can vote only in their precinct, rather than anywhere in the county, they said.

And Antenori said that he would like to make the plan ahead of an election, so that supervisors can get the legal battle with the state out of the way beforehand. Otherwise, he said, “I think we are fighting with two feet in the grave.”

After that discussion, Fontes sent the supervisors a letter warning them against it, saying the only hand count allowed is the statutorily prescribed review of ballots, which specifies how many ballots should be reviewed. “Manual tabulation of ballots outside of this prescribed sample audit, whether in addition to, or in lieu of using electronic tabulation equipment, raises many logistical as well as legal concerns,” he wrote.

But again in April, even as supervisors voted 2-1 to spend $308,000 on two new high-speed tabulation machines, they said they eventually want to get rid of them. At that meeting, Antenori repeated his desire to test the law on ballot tabulation, in civil court, before an election.

Gomez said at the time that she would like to get rid of machines to count votes, but she believes state law requires the county to use them. She said the same thing in a recent interview with Votebeat. Also, machine malfunctions during the 2024 elections, which didn’t affect the results but did slow down the counting process considerably, concerned her, she said, and she would have had trouble certifying that election.

At the April meeting, she asked the public to have patience while the supervisors figured it out. If they proceed now with the law as it is, she said, “they will come after us and they will put us in jail the minute we say we have no machines.”

It was one of many allusions supervisors made to the charges against Crosby, who has pleaded not guilty to interference with an election officer and conspiracy. As he awaits trial, Crosby has demanded the county cover about $300,000 in legal fees.

The supervisors had attempted to pass that claim on to the insurance pool that represents county governments in the state. But the pool denied that claim last month. A pool attorney said in an Aug. 11 letter that its agreement with the county excludes coverage of claims arising out of any “dishonest, fraudulent, criminal, malicious, deliberate or intended WRONGFUL ACT.”

The pool also reserves the right to deny a claim when “it does not involve accidental and fortuitous circumstances,” the lawyer wrote.

Last week, the supervisors met in private to discuss what to do now.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

The official who oversaw Apache County’s November election during widespread technical problems at polling places is no longer in her position, Votebeat has learned.

Rita Vaughan is out as county elections director, JP Martin, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office confirmed. The county manager did not respond to a request for comment about the reasons for Vaughan’s departure, or the date she left. Vaughan also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Voters and Navajo Nation officials have called for accountability after the Election Day problems across the county, which contains a large section of the Navajo Nation in the northeast corner of the state.

Voters seeking to cast ballots had to wait in lines for hours after the county’s equipment failed. Polling places that had emergency ballots quickly ran out, and for many voters, the only option was to use an accessible voting device until new equipment arrived, according to voters and observers. Polling places typically have only one or two of those accessible devices, which are designed for people with disabilities.

After the Navajo Nation sued on Election Day, an Apache County Superior Court judge ordered select polling places to stay open for two hours past the originally scheduled closing time. Lawyers for the Navajo Nation told the judge that, despite the county’s assertions, the problems persisted throughout the day, and some voters who were in line for hours in the cold chose to leave without voting.

Ethel Branch, the Navajo Nation Attorney General at the time, said later that month that the voters were disenfranchised.

“Despite this ruling, we will not be deterred from holding Apache County accountable for honoring all Navajo votes in future elections,” Branch wrote in a Nov. 22 Navajo Nation Department of Justice news release.

Vaughan told Votebeat on Election Day that the problem was with the county’s ballot-on-demand printers, and the county issued a news release saying the same. But county officials have not provided more details.

The Navajo Nation filed a second lawsuit after the election, asking a judge to provide more time for voters to fix problems with signatures on their ballots, because of delays in notifying voters of the problems. The county recorder, not the elections director, is in charge of that process. The judge dismissed that lawsuit.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

After Kari Lake lost her U.S. Senate race in November, some skeptics cried election fraud. They doubted that so many people who voted for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who carried Arizona, would split their ticket and back Ruben Gallego, Lake’s Democratic opponent.

In the past, local election analysts could counter such claims by analyzing a dataset known as the cast vote record — an electronic record of each anonymous ballot cast and all the votes recorded on it, including split-ticket votes.

But for this election, they’ve hit a roadblock: They can no longer get that data.

The counties that gave out their cast-vote record in the past now say that it is not a public record, or that they’ll provide only a heavily redacted version, without ruling specifically on whether the public is entitled to see it.

The limited access to the cast-vote record dismays some election analysts, including Benny White of Tucson, who said releasing it is important not only to quiet election fraud claims but also to ensure accuracy of results.

“If we are serious about making sure our elections are accurate, we have to find a way to more completely and comprehensively publicly audit the official results,” White said.

What is the cast vote record?

Arizona law is murky on whether the cast-vote record is the kind of document that can be released to the public. Because Attorney General Kris Mayes has not issued an opinion, counties have little guidance on whether they can or must make it available, and people who want to examine the election results have to fight from county to county for access.

The fight for the cast vote record in Arizona is just one recent example of the attempts across the country to meet voter demands for more election transparency and data, without compromising voters’ privacy. In Pennsylvania, for example, courts just ruled that the cast vote record itself is not a public record, but images of mail ballots are.

The cast vote record comes in different forms, but in many instances is a large spreadsheet with a record of the votes cast on each ballot, and other information indicating how and where the voter cast the ballot. Each row in the spreadsheet represents one voter’s ballot, and each column represents one of the choices on the ballot.

By itself, the cast vote record does not tie a voter’s name or identification number to a particular ballot. But in rare circumstances, pairing this dataset with the record of who voted in the election could show how some voters voted.

This occurred in Texas, where the cast vote record was one data source that activists apparently used to link a specific voter to the ballot he cast in a March 2024 primary election. After that, the state instructed election officials to redact election records far more extensively before releasing them.

While many Arizona counties have decided not to release the cast vote record, Maricopa County is currently preparing a redacted version for White. But White says the initial version he was sent last month was so heavily redacted it couldn’t be used for thorough analysis. Releasing the document in that form could “cause confusion, complaints of malfeasance, and mistrust of the election processes and the election officials,” he said.

In recent years, Republican lawmakers who say they want to improve voter trust have tried to change state law to specify that the cast vote record and corresponding digital images for each ballot are public records. Those proposals have gained some bipartisan support, including from Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, but concerns about privacy from voting rights groups stalled the proposals.

As the legislative session begins Monday, it’s unclear whether a proposal to clear up the law on cast vote records will be reintroduced this year. The main proponent, state Sen. Ken Bennett, a Republican, lost his seat in the July primary. Bennett said he would look for a new sponsor to carry that bill.

Until such a bill passes, individual counties “should not be deciding these issues haphazardly,” said Alex Gulotta, Arizona director of voting rights group All Voting is Local.

“Under current law,” he said, “there is no basis for releasing this information.”

Push for access pits transparency against privacy

Groups that oppose wider access to the cast vote records say their concerns are partly about how it could undermine the right to a secret ballot, which is guaranteed under federal law.

Some states allow the release of cast vote records as well as digital images of individual ballots. In limited circumstances, a person could figure out the identity and the choices of some voters by combining just a few datasets, if they aren’t redacted enough.

A recent study tried to determine just how limited those circumstances are. The study looked at a past Maricopa County election and found that the cast vote record, combined with voter information, could reveal the vote choices of 0.2% of the county’s voters — or fewer than 3,500 voters.

The study also pointed out that much of the data in the cast vote record that can lead to revealing a voter’s choices is already provided publicly in other ways, such as in reports of precinct-level results.

A Votebeat review of the precinct-level reports from small counties in Arizona’s November election found two instances in which combining that document with the record of who voted in each precinct would reveal voter choices. These were in small precincts with low turnout, where all of the voters who cast ballots in the precinct voted for the same candidate.

In one small precinct, for example, only four people voted for president, and they all voted for the same candidate. Looking up the four voters who participated in the election would reveal who they voted for.

Maricopa County releases those precinct reports, but the county’s system automatically redacts result from small precincts, Elections Director Scott Jarrett said.

Texas began ordering stricter redactions to protect voter secrecy last year after an investigation by Votebeat and the Texas Tribune showed that recent laws championed by state Republicans have made it easier to use publicly available election records to, in some instances, find how some people voted.

Last year in Texas, a conservative news site posted what it said was the primary ballot of former state GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi. The ballot had a vote for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, though Rinaldi had publicly endorsed Donald Trump in the primary.

Rinaldi did not respond to requests to confirm whether the ballot was his.

What does Arizona law say?

In Arizona, state law prohibits the release of electronic ballot data, but it doesn’t provide details on what exactly that means. And because Mayes has not issued guidance, Fontes’ office doesn’t have a formal legal opinion. So even though Fontes personally supports releasing the records, his office hasn’t told counties what to do.

Counties that say the record is exempt from disclosure, or not public, cite a few pieces of state law. One states that while counties are obligated to make certain existing records public, they do not need to create new records in response to public records requests. Some counties say that the cast vote record is not automatically sent to them from the voting machine company, so they do not need to provide it. The other rationale often cited is the state law prohibiting officials from releasing electronic ballot data.

“The officer in charge of elections shall ensure that electronic data from and electronic or digital images of ballots are protected from physical and electronic access, including unauthorized copying or transfer,” the statute says, “and that all security measures are at least as protective as those prescribed for paper ballots.”

But John Brakey of liberal-leaning election transparency group Audit USA says that the state enacted that law in 2017 in response to his organization’s attempts to get digital images of ballots, and that lawmakers never said the cast vote record would be restricted by it. The state senator who proposed it, according to a transcript Audit USA filed in a related court case, said the law was meant to prevent manipulation of digital ballot images.

Request for record gets contentious

Audit USA has routinely requested access to ballot images and cast vote records in Arizona and other states for more than a decade, and has often sued to try to get the records. But recently, the organization became the target of a lawsuit over one of its requests.

After Audit USA requested the cast vote record from Santa Cruz County following the 2022 primary election, the county sued the organization, seeking a ruling from the courts on whether it was obligated to release or shield the records.

The county released the cast vote record from the November 2020 election “due to the belief that these records were similar to any other election report that provides an aggregate of votes cast, votes rejected, undervotes, overvotes, etc,” the county said in its complaint. But it said “research has revealed the CVR and CVR database are electronic records of each individual ballot unlike summary reports.”

The case has now gone back and forth between the trial and appellate courts, and is still pending.

Meanwhile, Audit USA has spent at least $50,000 in legal fees.

Brakey and Audit USA attorney Bill Risner said they aren’t sure why Santa Cruz officials didn’t just ask the state attorney general for an opinion on whether the cast vote record is a public record, as they are entitled to do.

Santa Cruz County officials declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Maricopa and Pima counties change their stance

White, the election analyst in Tucson, said he was able to obtain the cast vote record from both Pima and Maricopa counties in 2020. In 2022, Maricopa provided him with the record. That data helped his team of analysts prove why Trump lost the state in 2020, and why Lake lost her gubernatorial bid in 2022. But this year, both counties are refusing to give it out in its original form.

The Pima County Attorney’s Office has determined the cast vote record “to be electronic data created from the ballot,” according to Elections Director Constance Hargrove. The county therefore refused to provide it to Audit USA after this election, citing the prohibition in state law.

In Maricopa County, the first time the county was asked to produce the cast vote record was after the 2020 election, under a subpoena from state Senate Republicans looking to audit the election results, said Jarrett, the elections director. Then, after the 2022 election, the cast vote record was released under court challenges. Both times, the county decided to also release the record publicly.

But after realizing that the record could potentially be used to tie a ballot to a voter, Jarrett said, officials have decided to redact the record before releasing it, to protect voter privacy.

White said counties should find a way to provide a full record of the votes cast on each ballot, without sacrificing voter privacy.

“There are reasons to control access to the cast vote record,” he said. “However, those restrictions are not part of Arizona law.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

As lawmakers across the country consider requiring documented proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, Arizona’s voter roll provides clues as to which voters will struggle to provide it.

Voters living on Native land, on college campuses, and at the state’s main homeless campus are all disproportionately represented among voters in Arizona who haven’t provided proof of citizenship, according to a Votebeat analysis of the list of eligible voters who hadn’t provided proof of citizenship for the presidential election. Such voters also were three times less likely to vote this past November than voters who had provided proof of citizenship, the analysis found.

The data shows that, while GOP lawmakers pushing for a documentation requirement say they are attempting to prevent noncitizens from voting — a rare occurrence, according to all available evidence — the requirement in Arizona appears to be disenfranchising some Americans.

Arizona is the only state in the country currently limiting voting for those who don’t prove citizenship by providing a birth certificate or another qualifying document. Such voters can cast ballots in federal elections, but not state and local elections.

The voters who don’t provide such documents are marked as a “federal-only” voter and receive a ballot with just presidential and congressional contests. This applied to less than 1% of the state’s voter roll, or 34,933 out of around 4.4 million active voters eligible for this past November election.

In all other states, voters simply attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. They don’t have to provide documents proving it.

Voters living on tribal land, college campuses, and at the state’s largest homeless campus frequently tell advocacy organizations that they aren’t able to provide documents proving their citizenship because they don’t have easy or immediate access to them when registering. And many college students and Native voters first register to vote at third-party registration drives away from home when they hadn’t necessarily planned to do so, and don’t follow up later to provide additional documentation.

Allie Redhorse Young, director and founder of Navajo advocacy group Protect the Sacred, said it’s just another barrier for Native voters who have long faced challenges voting.

“It’s pretty outrageous for the first people who lived in this country to have these challenges trying to vote,” Young said.

Here’s everything we know about who Arizona’s federal-only voters are, and where they live.

Federal-only voters are unlikely voters in Arizona

The vast majority of federal-only voters are on the list because they didn’t provide documentation of citizenship. But a minimal number are on the list because they haven’t provided proof of residency required under a new state law.

Together, the voters in Arizona who haven’t provided proof of citizenship or residency make up a tiny portion of the state’s voter roll.

These federal-only voters also voted far less often than registered voters in general.

Turnout from active voters who hadn’t provided documents proving citizenship in Arizona was about 19% in the November presidential election, compared to 79% turnout among other active registered voters.

Federal-only voters are spread out pretty evenly across the state with the vast majority of precincts having just a dozen or fewer.

But there are some places where they are more concentrated.

Many federal-only voters live on tribal land

Voters living on tribal land are more likely to find themselves on the federal-only list.

Of all active federal-only voters, 7.3% live in precincts on or close to reservations, whereas voters on tribal land make up only 2.5% of all registered voters, according to a Votebeat analysis. And only 3.6% of the voting-age population in the state is Indigenous, according to U.S. Census voter population estimates. Many of those people do not live on tribal land.

In particular, some precincts on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona saw higher per-capita rates of federal-only voters, compared to precincts in the rest of the state.

There are a few reasons why Indigenous voters may not provide proof of citizenship as often, according to Native voting advocates.

For one, there’s been a big push in recent years to get Indigenous voters registered to vote, so many organizations host voter registration drives at community events or at chapter houses on tribal land. If the voter doesn’t have documentation with them at those events, Young with Protect the Sacred said, it’s a long way back home to get it.

Young’s group hosts voter registration events on the Navajo Nation, including her highly publicized get-out-the-vote horseback rides.

“If they show up without this documentation, it’s likely they aren’t going to drive the 40 minutes and back again,” she said.

Young said the organizations hosting the drive must be clear to residents, before and during the event, that they need to provide this documentation. But she said she knows that some groups conducting voter registration drives on the Navajo reservation turn in incomplete or inaccurate forms.

Young also said many elders living on the reservation may not have documentation proving citizenship at all. Votebeat’s analysis confirmed that the federal-only voters in precincts containing tribal land are generally older than those elsewhere. In fact, 16% of federal-only voters on precincts containing tribal land were 65 and older, compared to 10% in the rest of the state.

Some of these older residents may not have an Arizona driver’s license, which can be used to prove citizenship if issued after 1996, and also may not have a birth certificate. They could potentially have a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, which can also be used to prove citizenship. But, Young said, “it’s one of those documents you don’t have in your wallet.”

Of the federal-only voters who cast ballots in November, at least 8% live on or near tribal land, according to the analysis.

Many federal-only voters are on college campuses

There are just seven precincts, out of roughly 1,700 in the state, where more than 5% of voters cast federal-only ballots in November. They all either include parts of, or are adjacent to, college campuses.

At least 6% of people relegated to the federal-only voter roll live in just three precincts at the center of each of the state’s three public universities’ main campuses. That percentage doubles if expanded to include nearby precincts that include student housing.

Federal-only voters make up 29% of the voters in those three precincts, compared with 0.8% of the overall voter roll.

Student advocates believe they know why college students are landing on the list: Like tribal land, college campuses are targeted by organizations trying to register new voters in the state.

Kyle Nitschke, the organizing director of the Arizona Students’ Association, helps run some of those voter registration drives. Data from his past registration drives found that around 1 in 3 of the students registering have not been able to provide an in-state driver’s license or other form of citizenship proof on the spot at such events.

Nitschke said that’s because many students are originally from out of state, and these drives take place when they first move to Arizona to attend college. So they’re eligible to vote there, but may not have an Arizona-issued driver’s license or have their birth certificate handy.

Changes that went into effect this summer, under a new law requiring proof of residency and requiring state registration forms to be rejected outright if citizenship is not provided, made it even more complicated to get a new student full ballot status, Nitschke said.

Nitsche cautions other states against passing proof of citizenship laws, because he’s seen its impact on the college student population.

“It’s not about citizenship, like they say it is,” he said. “It’s an attack on student voters, and voters from out of state. It just doesn’t solve a problem.”

In the November election, around 7% of federal-only voters who cast ballots live in the three precincts at the center of the main college campuses.

Federal-only voters are often young and unaffiliated

In a potentially related finding, the data show that federal-only voters are generally younger than the voting-age population in the state.

People 18 to 24 years old are roughly 3.6 times as likely to be federal-only voters than people 25 and older.

The federal-only voters who voted in November also followed this pattern.

They’re also more likely to not belong to a political party, compared to all registered voters. That makes sense because these voters are younger, which means they are newer voters, and newer voters are generally less often affiliated with a major party.

But unaffiliated voters, generally, vote at lower rates, and the same was true for those on the federal-only list. Therefore, the political makeup of federal-only voters who actually cast ballots in November looked more like the political makeup of the general voting population.

Arizona doesn’t collect race or ethnicity information from voters when they register, so Votebeat was unable to analyze either.

But in testimony given during a trial on Arizona’s citizenship laws in 2023, Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida, told the judge that his analysis found that federal-only voters live in communities that are more diverse, compared to full-ballot voters. The average community for a registered voter in Arizona is 62.9 percent non-Hispanic white, he said, but the average community of a federal-only voter is 47.3 percent non-Hispanic white.

A hot spot on a homeless campus

The other hotspot precinct in the state containing a larger number of federal-only voters includes the state’s main homeless campus, Keys to Change, in downtown Phoenix. The campus has mailboxes that people can use as a mailing address.

There are 510 voters registered at the address, and around half of them, or 269, are federal-only voters, according to Maricopa County data.

Those 269 voters make up 40% of the 669 federal-only voters in the precinct.

Rick Mitchell, executive director of the Phoenix-based Homeless ID Project, said there are several reasons why someone experiencing homelessness might not have a state ID or birth certificate. His organization helps people get new documents, and store them.

Mitchell said people who have recently been evicted, who are aging out of foster care, or who are fleeing domestic violence are among those he helps obtain new identification. He also sees some people who have lost their documents as they move around or live on the street.

In 2023, his organization helped around 20 individuals a day get a birth certificate, and around 40 a day get a new state identification card.

When people come looking for help, they are often trying to get a new job, get housing, or get into school. While getting an ID, they will be asked through the Motor Vehicle Division if they want to register to vote.

Those people might then land on the federal-only list.

But only 19 people of the 669 on the list voted in the November election from the precinct where the homeless campus is located. It has one of the lowest federal-only voting rates in the state, despite having the fourth highest share of federal-only voters.

The people who Mitchell helps have other priorities, he said.

“If I have nothing, and I’m trying to get reestablished, voting isn’t one of them.”

Kae Petrin is a data reporter for Votebeat. Contact Kae at kpetrin@chalkbeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This story was published by Votebeat in partnership with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Votebeat is a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide investigative reporting. Sign up for the AZCIR newsletter and Votebeat Arizona newsletter.

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad.

He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election.

When he submitted his mail ballot in November 2022, however, that messy signature would cost him his vote.

Election officials who compared the signature on his mail ballot envelope to the electronic scribble on file weren’t convinced they came from the same person. So, as the law requires, they rejected his ballot. He didn’t find out until weeks later.

“I was so irritated,” said Kennedy, who lives in Gilbert in Maricopa County. “It made absolutely no sense to me.”

With more people in Arizona and across the country voting by mail, election officials are increasingly relying on the signatures on ballot envelopes to confirm voters’ identities. And in response to unsubstantiated claims of widespread mail voter fraud, some have tightened their signature verification processes.

That’s especially true in Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona and a focal point of false claims about election fraud. Under a more stringent review process, the number of ballots rejected in the county for questionable signatures tripled, from 586 to 1,798, between the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterm. That doesn’t include the ballots rejected because there was no voter signature at all — 1,299 in 2022.

But flaws in the county’s signature verification process may lead to disenfranchisement that disproportionately affects voters who are younger, newly registered or those who do not belong to a political party, Votebeat and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found in a monthslong analysis of the rejected midterm ballots.

In a state where some elections are decided by just a few hundred votes, these rejected ballots — about 3,000 at the state level for mismatched signatures alone in 2022 — could affect the outcome of an election.

Votebeat and AZCIR mailed letters to all 1,798 Maricopa County voters who had their ballots rejected for this reason, analyzed who they are and spoke to more than a dozen of them about their experience.

Newer and younger voters are more likely to have their signature affected, the investigation found, in part because they may only have one signature on file, and that signature is most commonly from their driver’s license record, signed on an electronic pad. Those electronic signatures often don’t capture how a voter really signs their name.

The rejections for mismatched signatures also disproportionately impact voters not affiliated with a political party, in large part because they don’t have the backing of a political party to help contact voters once signature problems are identified.

And the analysis confirms what voter advocates have long said: Older voters and those with disabilities sometimes see their ballots rejected because their signatures have changed over time.

Sandra Lines, a retired forensic document examiner in Paradise Valley who once ran a lab in the Attorney General’s Office, said trying to verify a signature against only a small sample of signatures that were collected for different purposes is “just not a valid thing to do.”

County workers go through hours of training before trying to determine whether someone’s signature is valid. But they aren’t handwriting experts, and the process itself — reviewing millions of signatures in just a few days — doesn’t come close to the type of forensic examination used in other circumstances, such as criminal cases, to validate a signature.

But the checks can have serious consequences: If the voter doesn’t respond to workers questioning their signature in time, their ballot will be rejected.

“It’s an impossible job,” Linton Mohammed, a certified forensic document examiner who testifies in ballot signature court cases, said of the ballot signature verification process. “They may get most of it right, but they are also going to get people being disenfranchised.”

Republican state lawmakers have tried for years to switch to a system in which mail voters are asked to provide an identification number to confirm their identity. A ballot proposition for this plan, pushed by the conservative Arizona Free Enterprise Club, failed narrowly in the 2022 midterm. Greg Blackie, the club’s policy director, said reviewing signatures is a subjective process, and having objective ID requirements is better.

“It would lead to less signatures that are actually good being tossed out and increase the integrity of the process for mail in voting,” Blackie said.

But Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting is Local, said it’s best to fix problems with the current system, rather than tossing it all together.

“Signatures are a form of valid identification,” he said. “But we have to collect them in a meaningful and thoughtful way for them to be able to perform that function.”

‘Let down and lied to’: Voters respond to having ballot rejected

The vast majority of Arizonans vote by mail, and, for this election, those ballots are being sent to the 77% of the state’s 4.1 million voters who are on the early voting list.

Those voters must sign their ballot envelope before putting their ballot in the mail or dropping it off at a drop box. Arizona law requires counties to notify voters when they flag an inconsistent or missing signature, and the law gives voters until five days after Election Day to call, text, or visit county offices to fix the problem. This “cure” period, as it is called, coupled with the sheer number of mail ballots cast, is part of what delays the reporting of election results.

Maricopa County’s robust curing process allowed more than 15,000 voters to fix problems with their signatures during the midterm election. But some don’t get the message in time, and there’s concern that there could be more of them this year.

A bipartisan law meant to speed up final results shortened the cure period from five business days to five days total. So voters this year will have until Nov. 10, the Sunday after the election, to respond to inquiries about a missing or mismatched signature.

Many will wait until the last day to vote, which will give them less time to find out about problems with their signature. During the 2022 midterm election, for example, Maricopa County voters dropped off 290,000 mail ballots at the polls on Election Day.

If officials can’t reach someone by phone, they send letters and must rely on the U.S. Postal Service to reach voters. That can take some time, as Votebeat and AZCIR learned by trying to contact the 1,798 voters by mail: Only about half of the letters were delivered within five days.

Gulotta said it often takes several days just for mail to reach voters, and people who use post office boxes may not check them daily. Data from a recent lawsuit, he said, found that some mail delivery in northern Arizona takes up to seven days. “Text, email, and phone are all better means to contact voters,” he said.

Of the 15 voters who responded to our May letter, about half said in a survey that they remember the county notifying them. Two voters said they called the county and tried to fix the issue. One said they had spoken to someone, and believed the problem had been resolved — but then learned from our letter that it hadn’t. Others didn’t know their signatures had been rejected at all.

“Like why did I even vote?” Nicala Schmit wrote in her reply. “Especially when I wrote my signature very neatly, and they reject it.”

Schmit, now 21, was voting for the first time in 2022. She had her ballot rejected again in 2023 and this year, according to the county’s records.

“Honestly if it were not for you reaching out to me who knows when I would have gotten this issue fixed,” she wrote in an email.

In addition to the survey, a team of reporters reviewed hundreds of other voters’ signatures that were rejected in November 2022. The signatures were often different from what was on file from the MVD or previous elections. That’s not necessarily an indication of fraud, though. Kennedy had voted in the state before, but had only his MVD signature on file because he had just moved back to Arizona. He often signs his name in two different ways, he said, depending on what kind of document he is signing.

“There has to be a better way to do this,” Kennedy said.

It was not possible to find out if or how the county tried to contact the voters who said they didn’t hear from anyone, because the county said it didn’t save this information electronically at the time; it was only noted on the ballot envelope itself. The office has since made this process more trackable by photographing the envelope and adding the image to the voter’s file.

For Litzy Salinas, the experience of having her ballot rejected tainted her first time attempting to vote. “I feel very upset that I’m just finding this out,” she wrote in the survey. “It was my first time exercising my right to vote and I was very proud to do so … I feel let down and lied to.”

In two instances, the person who responded to the letter said the signature on the ballot envelope was, in fact, someone else’s. One who replied on behalf of her mother said her mother was ill at the time and had given her permission to fill out and sign her ballot envelope for her. The other voter said that he asked his mother to sign his ballot envelope because he was out of the country at the time.

Maricopa County Recorder’s Office spokesperson Sierra Ciaramella said the fact that these two ballots were rejected is an “example of our signature verification process working as it should.”

State: Electronic signatures might be ‘blurry’ or ‘messy’

County workers are trained to first look at the broad characteristics of the signature, such as whether it is cursive or print, whether it was written fast or slowly, and the spacing or size. The goal is not to check for an exact match, but to make sure they are “comparable.”

One clear pattern in the review of 2022 signatures, and in a data analysis done separately, were problems with the electronic signatures taken at the Motor Vehicle Division. About 3 out of every 4 people who registered to vote in the state in the last three years did so by signing a pad at the MVD or its satellite offices, according to data from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Mark Songer, a document examiner who trains election workers on signature verification in Colorado, said using a stylus automatically makes a signature different from one done with a pen. Mohammed, the forensic document expert, called electronic signatures “useless.”

The state acknowledges the challenges with electronic signatures. The guide used to train county workers says electronic signatures might be “blurry” or “messy.”

“However, you should not waste time trying to ‘explain away’ the differences that you see,” the guide said. “If you find yourself laboring to do so, you should still flag it for a second check.”

The youngest voters, ages 18 to 24, were most likely to have their ballots rejected, according to Votebeat and AZCIR’s analysis. About 36% of the rejected ballots for mismatched signatures came from that age group, which make up about 9% of the overall voter roll.

Generally, the longer the person had been registered to vote — and the more likely they were to have additional signatures on file — the less likely their ballot was to be rejected. About 34% of these voters had registered to vote either in 2021 or 2022, meaning they would have another signature on file only if they voted in a local election or updated their registration at some point before the midterm.

Reviewing the rejected signatures from older voters, it was obvious to reporters their signatures changed over time and with age. The same is often true for voters with disabilities, said Vicki Cuscino, executive director of the Tucson-based Direct Advocacy and Resource Center.

People who have cognitive disabilities, have trouble with their hands, or who are aging into disability all see their signatures change over time, Cuscino said. She said the signature verification system “reflects institutionalized ableism” by assuming that everyone can sign their name in a small, marked area on the envelope.

Asim Dietrich, a lawyer for Disability Rights Arizona and a voter in Maricopa County, said that his signature was initially flagged as a mismatched signature in a recent election. He experiences paralysis due to muscular dystrophy.

“My signature changed as I got weaker,” he said.

Dietrich said he called the county and verified his signature. Days later, he checked online and there was no record that he did so. Luckily, he had time to call again, and his signature was marked as verified. He said he was concerned not everyone would have the time or resources to call.

Stephen Richer tightens the signature review process

Maricopa County rejected about 0.14% of mail ballots for mismatched signatures in 2022, a low rate compared with some other counties. Cochise and Navajo, for example, rejected 0.67% and 0.61% of mail ballots for mismatched signatures during the midterm election, according to county data.

Cochise County Recorder David Stevens said that rate is fairly consistent for the county, and he doesn’t know why it would be more than other counties. He explained the county has a three-step process for reviewing signatures, with him making the final decision on which are flagged for curing. He described a curing process similar to Maricopa’s.

Maricopa County stands out because its system has been scrutinized, and that scrutiny led Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, to tighten the process after he was elected in 2020 — at least partly as a result of criticism from his own party.

He added more steps and training to the process prior to the 2022 election.

The county mostly uses temporary workers for the task, but county employees also pitch in. Anyone who reviews signatures takes an eight-hour forensics class. The temporary workers have an additional two-day training that focuses mainly on signature verification, and county workers take a three- to four-hour class.

The initial reviewer typically has three signatures on file to compare with the voter signature on the envelope, up from one before Richer took office. Of the signatures they approve, 2% are checked again in an audit.

Signatures that are flagged as not comparable go to a manager, who has access to all of the voter’s signatures on file — although for newly registered voters, there would be only one. If the manager rejects it, the county reaches out to the voter for verification.

Even Richer isn’t sold on the process.

“I’d much rather machines do the signature review if possible,” Richer said in an April 2022 tweet. “No bias, no racism, no sleepy, no hungry, no slacking, less cost.” He declined to comment on the investigation’s findings.

Some counties in other states, such as Colorado and California, use computers as the first step in verifying mail voter signatures. Maricopa County used to, but Richer turned it off after some Republicans objected. A GOP-sponsored bill to ban the use of AI in this kind of a process was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in 2023.

Political party curing boosted Attorney General Kris Mayes

Despite Richer’s changes, the workers checking early and mailed ballots during the midterm initially flagged roughly the same percentage of mismatched signatures as they did in 2020 — just over 1% each election.

What caused the number of rejected ballots to triple from one election to the next appears to be a more robust curing process. In the 2022 midterm, it appears workers cured a smaller proportion of ballots than in 2020, although exact numbers from 2020 were not available. Of about 18,500 ballots flagged for a mismatched or missing signature in 2022, about 15,500 were cured. In 2020, about 26,000 signatures were flagged, and about 24,000 were cured.

This year, the county hired 14 temporary workers to contact voters who have signature problems, and they started reaching out to voters on Monday, once early ballots started coming in. That’s up from five or six in 2022, but appears to be down from 2020, when at times there were 40 people working on curing.

The office is diligent in its attempts to reach voters, Ciaramella said in an email response to several questions from Votebeat and AZCIR. And depending on demand, she said the office could add up to 40 staff to help with curing.

The county attempts to contact a voter as soon as a manager makes the final call to flag their signature, she said, and tries to reach them three times. The first attempt is a letter, and anyone signed up for the ballot tracking text messages will get an alert. But if the election is less than a week away by the time the signature is flagged, the county calls them instead, if there’s a phone number on file or on their mail ballot envelope. This November, the county is going to text voters directly, too, she said.

Political parties often step in to help counties get signature problems solved before the deadline. A new law this election cycle requires counties to provide political parties a list of voters who need to fix problems with their ballots and update the list daily.

The curing effort by parties was especially notable in 2022, when candidates for attorney general were in a tight race.

The group organizing the Democratic effort for Kris Mayes told the Arizona Republic they believe their efforts — going door to door, calling and texting voters — spurred 3,400 people to cure their ballots by the deadline. Mayes ended up winning the attorney general’s race by 280 votes.

People who were not registered with a party represent just 31% of registered voters in Arizona, but they accounted for about 40% of those whose ballots were rejected for mismatched signatures in 2022, the Votebeat/AZCIR analysis shows.

That pattern could also be explained by the fact that newly registered voters are less likely than more established voters to be registered with a party.

Progressive lobbyist Marilyn Rodriguez said disparities highlight the need for counties to devote more resources and have more time for curing. If not, it’s an uneven playing field, she said, based on “who has the time, capacity, people power, and contact information to go and chase the people down.”

Conservatives and voting rights groups disagree on solutions

While 31 states use signature verification to verify the identity of mail voters, several states including Georgia and Texas require an identification number. A few states require a witness, and 10 states verify that a signature is present but don’t examine it.

Blackie and the Free Enterprise Club believe eligibility should be determined in the same way for every voter. The proposal on the ballot in 2022 would have made free state voter ID cards available, Blackie said, to get around the concern that some voters might not have another type of ID.

But Gulotta and others believe that requiring ID numbers would lead to more rejected ballots. A 2021 analysis by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab found that states that require both signatures and ID generally reject more ballots, but little research has been done directly comparing the two methods.

Gulotta said that instead of changing the system entirely, one relatively easy fix would help: The Motor Vehicle Division could use better technology to collect more accurate driver’s license signatures, or even collect a pen-and-ink signature instead. And it could help educate voters that it will be used to verify their identity when they vote by mail.

Barbara Smith Warner of the National Vote at Home Institute, which promotes mail voting, said Arizona counties could take a look at the design of their ballot envelope to make sure it’s educating voters on how the signature will be used.

Maricopa County’s ballot envelope warns voters that the ballot will not be counted without their signature, but the warnings are small.

In Pima County, Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly recently changed the envelope design, adding multiple warnings in red, with a large, bold “Wait!” to emphasize the importance of the signature.

As of this year, all Arizona counties also offer ballot tracking services. These services allow voters to send a text to initiate the process of fixing the problem with their signature.

Only 257,000 Maricopa County voters are signed up for ballot tracking via email or text message, while nearly 2 million voters are on the county’s active early voting list.

Kennedy is now one of them. He supports using voter ID instead of signatures to verify mail voter identity, but overall says he wants to see that “everyone who wants to vote will have their votes counted.”

“These elections are so close,” he said. “Simple mistakes can choose the course of leadership for years. So I would like to avoid them, if possible.”

Brandon Quester, Maria Polletta and Natasha Yee from the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting contributed.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org. Hannah Bassett is a reporter for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Contact Hannah at hannah.bassett@azcir.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Conservative groups want a federal judge to force Arizona counties to further investigate the status of voters who have not provided documented proof of citizenship.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Arizona claims that counties haven’t been checking the citizenship status of these voters using specific methods required under federal and state law, including two new state laws enacted in 2022.

It’s the latest in a slew of Republican-backed challenges to voters’ citizenship status across the country just before the November election, based on the premise that voting by noncitizens is a pressing problem in the U.S. — even though the practice is illegal and, according to experts, rare.

Former President Donald Trump and some of his allies have claimed without evidence that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voting by noncitizens. But any noncitizen who attempts to vote would be risking a felony charge, loss of their residency status, and deportation.

The lawsuit, brought by the Trump-aligned America First Legal Foundation on behalf of a local nonprofit, the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, asks the court to force counties to complete the more detailed citizenship investigations, but is silent on timing. Federal law prohibits counties from systematically removing ineligible voters from the voter rolls within 90 days of a primary or general federal election.

In July, America First Legal sent a letter to all 15 county recorders asking how they had been complying with the new laws. Multiple counties have since said that they are following all voter list maintenance laws. Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, for example, responded on July 26 and said the county uses multiple tools to confirm voter citizenship, and that counties across the state are working with the Secretary of State’s Office to comply with the new laws. She stressed that the county understands the importance of proper list maintenance.

“In rare cases where someone who is not eligible actually attempts to register to vote, there are safeguards and laws to ensure that only eligible persons can vote,” Cázares-Kelly wrote.

Federal law doesn’t require voters to provide proof of their citizenship status, though they must attest — under penalty of perjury — that they are eligible citizens by marking a checkbox when registering to vote. But Arizona has unique laws that require documented proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in state and local elections.

About 40,000 registered voters in the state haven’t provided such documentation, and therefore receive a ballot that allows them to vote only for president and Congress. A December 2023 Votebeat analysis found that these “federal only” voters are more likely to be young and living on or near college campuses. Other analysis has found that they are more likely to be naturalized citizens.

County recorders, who manage voter registration in the state, already conduct detailed checks of voter citizenship when someone registers to vote. If they do not find proof of citizenship after checking state and federal databases, the registrant becomes a federal-only voter.

The two new laws, enacted by Republicans in 2022, were aimed at further restricting voting for federal-only voters and targeting them for more extensive citizenship investigations. But voting rights groups challenged those laws in court, and those challenges are still ongoing.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton earlier this year struck down the most significant sections of the new laws, including portions that would prohibit federal-only voters from voting for president or by mail. Republicans have appealed that portion of her ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the appeal is pending. The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected most of a Republican request for an emergency stay in the case.

But Bolton affirmed the portions of the new laws that required recorders to perform more extensive and regular citizenship checks, and that required the recorders to send to the attorney general a list of their federal-only voters for citizenship investigations. Her final ruling, on May 2, came within 90 days of the July 30 primary.

America First Legal had initially sued Maricopa County before expanding the lawsuit to all 15 counties. In response to the initial lawsuit, Maricopa County said that it is fully complying with all laws and that it believes America First Legal is misunderstanding the new statutes. For example, the county wrote, the county has no ongoing obligation to send a list of federal-only voters to the attorney general.

America First Legal asserted that the lack of proper list maintenance had led to voter distrust. In response, Maricopa County said that any erosion in public trust “is largely a result of sham lawsuits that make unfounded allegations, untethered from reality, and spread those allegations over the Internet in fund raising appeals.”

Yavapai County Recorder Michelle Burchill said in an email to Votebeat on Wednesday that she uses “all databases available to check citizenship status.” She also said she has been actively trying to get access to one database that America First Legal points out should be available, through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but “it has been a slow process and I keep getting told to contact other departments and emails.”

“If there is any additional databases available, I will absolutely use them,” she wrote. “I want to ensure all voters who are US Citizens have the opportunity to vote a full ballot. I also want to ensure that there is no NON-Citizens on my voter rolls and prevent someone from voting and getting themselves into more trouble.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Many Arizona residents seeking to register to vote ahead of Tuesday’s primary were blocked from the voter rolls because of problems with the paper registration forms they used, according to a Votebeat analysis of longstanding issues with the forms.

The paper forms are the type commonly distributed and collected by civic groups and political parties during voter registration drives. Election officials around the state value these third-party outreach efforts, but have said for years that forms they’re receiving often have inaccuracies or other deficiencies, such as a missing ID number, birthdate or signature, or a bogus name. Such lapses complicate the work of county recorders, and may disenfranchise even some voters who are already registered.

Votebeat was able to collect data that shows for the first time the extent of the problem. In Maricopa County, around a third of the voters who tried to register with a paper form in the week before a July 1 deadline were found to be likely eligible to register, but nonetheless had their registration blocked because of a problem with the form, according to new data obtained by Votebeat.

Around the state, as of late July, about 24,000 residents, including some already registered voters, had their registrations placed on hold until they could confirm or correct their information with local election officials; in 2020, Joe Biden’s margin of victory was about 10,500 votes.

Several county recorders and their staff said the inaccurate and incomplete forms overburden their small teams, which are legally required to process the forms, no matter how faulty. And if they can’t reach the voter to fix the problems, voters who may believe they are registered aren’t actually added to the active voter list.

Janine Petty, Maricopa County’s senior director of voter registration, said her office has the same mission as the voter registration groups — to register voters.

“But we also want to make sure that we are complying with the laws,” she said.

The forms present additional challenges in counties such as Apache that encompass tribal lands, which often lack residential addresses. Voters there might describe their location by physical or natural landmarks, and it takes a while to pinpoint where they live. Staff members there report having spent more than an hour on just one form trying to figure out where a voter lives.

Former secretaries of state have flagged these problems for more than a decade, but lawmakers are divided about how to try to solve them.

Republican state lawmakers have proposed creating new rules for voter registration groups, such as prohibiting them from paying workers for each they turn in, or requiring disclaimers on third-party mailers to distinguish them from official government mail. Democrats and some civic engagement groups have opposed those measures, advocating instead for reforms such as automatic voter registration.

Pinny Sheoran, president of the League of Women Voters of Arizona, said her group has opposed the Republican proposals as too restrictive. But she also said she recognizes the gravity of the problem, and believes better training for the canvassers who distribute and collect forms is part of the answer.

She said her group’s workers are “hawk-like” in making sure the people they register complete their forms accurately. For a voter to go through the effort to complete the form but not be registered would be “a terrible shame and disservice to that voter,” Sheoran said.

Inaccurate forms cause problems for already registered voters

Most Arizonans register to vote electronically, but political parties and advocacy organizations turn in thousands of paper forms across the state in the weeks leading up to the registration deadline for each election. For the July 30 primary, the deadline was July 1.

In the week leading up to that deadline, Maricopa County received 2,980 paper forms.

Of those, 1,038 were from voters not already registered to vote. But because of problems with the forms, only 682 of those people were added to the active voter rolls. Most of the rest were deemed likely eligible to register, but the county had to put their registrations on hold, or into what’s known as suspense status, until the voters fix the problems with their forms. These voters will not get a mail ballot if they have requested one, and they will need to fix the problem with their form before voting in person.

In some cases, voters who were already successfully registered to vote can run into problems if they try to make a change to their registration, or submit a duplicate form by mistake. If their new paper form is missing critical information — such as name, address, date of birth, or signature — the clerk is required to place their registration in suspense status until the issue is resolved, even though they were already registered before, according to a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office.

State law requires that counties notify people when placing them in suspense status, the office said. But sometimes, the voter still doesn’t correct the flaw in time to get back on the rolls.

How one voter registration group trains field workers

The Maricopa data obtained by Votebeat backs up what election officials have long said — that some organizations are better than others at turning in complete forms.

One of the most successful during the time period Votebeat studied was Poder Latinx, a Latino civic engagement organization, which successfully registered around 92% of the people who filled out the form.

Poder Latinx’s Arizona state program director, Nancy Herrera, said the organization — which registers voters in six states — requires workers to undergo a full day of training on voter registration before they go into the field, with specific training on how to guide people through the form.

“We do take more time with our applicants because we want to ensure they are participants in the upcoming election,” Herrera said.

Herrera says Poder Latinx has weekly check-ins with field staff to answer their questions, and also tries to follow up with counties when dropping forms off to see if counties have flagged any flaws with their forms.

To prevent someone from filling out a duplicative form if they are already registered, workers ask the registrants questions, such as when they last voted, Herrera said.

Sheoran, from the League of Women Voters, said many of her members doing voter registration work in Maricopa County go through the county’s deputy registrar program to get trained on the laws and requirements. She believes all counties should institute a similar program for this purpose.

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office encourages organizations engaged in voter registration work to go through that training.

Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, a Democrat, said her county tries to train the voter registration groups as much as possible, but high staff turnover makes it hard to ensure that forms are filled out correctly.

She cited one case where a voter had filed 21 separate forms with her office, apparently attempting to reregister or update their information.

But she said she believes the work that advocacy organizations do to educate and register voters is important, especially because Arizona doesn’t have automatic voter registration and she doesn’t have enough staffing to do significant voter outreach.

Cázares-Kelly believes the best solution would be allowing automatic and same-day voter registration. Those ideas are a longshot in Arizona with Republicans controlling the Legislature. But she said Republicans need to “stop pretending that it wouldn’t be helpful.”

Forms with fake names add to the burden

In Apache County, the recorder’s office has just three people to process voter registration forms Some days, dozens will be dropped off by a given group, and staff members estimate that around 3 out of every 10 can’t immediately be processed because they are incomplete or inaccurate.

Petty said her office in Maricopa County often sees forms with incorrect information such as a birthdate that is off a few digits. Sometimes a form will come in for someone they believe is already registered, and it takes work to make sure it is the same person.

And then there are the forms that come in with names like “Mickey Mouse” or “Donald Duck.”

Petty and other election officials suspect that some circulators may be responsible for these because they get paid for each form they turn in.

State Sen. Ken Bennett, a Republican and former secretary of state, introduced a bill this year that would have banned voter registration groups from paying employees for each form they turn in, a practice he claims incentivizes fraud.

The bill was blocked in committee in the House, but he hopes to try again next year.

Voting rights groups generally object to new restrictions on groups that register voters, especially given that several states have already limited how such groups do their work, with sometimes harsh penalties for organizations that break the rules.

Since 2021, at least six states have enacted laws restricting third-party voter registration assistance, according to the Voting Rights Lab.

A Florida law enacted in 2023, for example, prohibited noncitizens from helping with nonpartisan voter registration drives and imposed a $50,000 fine on organizations that violate the law. A federal judge recently blocked portions of that law, after the League of Women Voters, Poder Latinx, and other organizations filed a lawsuit.

Prefilled mailers cause problems

In Yavapai County, Recorder Michelle Burchill said the biggest issue for her team this year has been the use of an old version of an official form that voters use to be placed on the active early-voting list.

The older form has former Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ seal on it. Hobbs is now the governor.

Some voters have been getting a copy of the form in the mail, with their name, address, and birthdate prefilled. The problem is, half of the time, the prefilled birthdate is wrong.

Burchill said she isn’t sure who is sending out the form. Similar forms have long been distributed by political parties or advocacy groups that use commercially available information to develop mailing lists of potential voters.

But from speaking to voters, her staff has come to believe that some of them are returning the prefilled forms because they mistakenly believe they are required to.

Burchill said she strongly believes that no one should be permitted to send out prefilled forms. “These documents, often created with outdated voter information, inadvertently contribute to voter distrust and hinder the electoral process’s integrity,” Burchill said.

Tennessee enacted a law this year that bans organizations from prefilling voter information on mailers.

State Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican, proposed a bill in 2023 at the request of Maricopa County Recorder’s Office that would require a disclosure saying any mailing sent out from third-party registration groups isn’t a government mailer.

In testimony to lawmakers, Aaron Flannery, government liaison for the recorder’s office, said that during a recent election cycle, the county had received about 3,300 forms from voters spurred by third-party mailers, and about 82% of those people were already registered, and needed no update to their records.

Flannery said the mailers lead to phone calls from confused or angry residents. “My husband has been dead for 11 years,” Flannery quoted one caller as saying. “Why are you trying to register him again?”

State Rep. Cesar Aguilar, a Democrat, said in a recent interview that his dad, who is a permanent U.S. resident but not a citizen, once received what he believed to be an official mailer saying he was eligible to register to vote, when he is not.

Aguilar said he isn’t sure that the Republican proposals would fix the problem. But he said he thinks there might be room for the Legislature to come together on a solution in future years.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

A global Microsoft-based computer outage early Friday crippled the electronic systems Arizona’s two largest counties use for early in-person voting, causing election officials to quickly divert to backup plans to keep early voting open for the state’s primary election.

The breakdown affected the devices that Maricopa and Pima counties use at voting locations to check voters in, verify voter eligibility and print ballots. It did not affect the machines the counties use to count ballots, which are not used during early voting because voters place their completed ballots into envelopes to be counted later.

The outage hit in the middle of the night, and when polls opened, the counties had chosen different plans on what to do about it: Maricopa only opened four of its planned 41 locations at 9 a.m.— the locations where it was able to immediately get new equipment. Pima decided to open all six sites it had planned to on time at 8 a.m. but switched to using provisional ballots. It’s unclear if any other Arizona counties faced outages that affected early voting, although many others said they did not.

The outage comes as the state is more than halfway into its early voting period for the July 30 primary election, on a light day of early voting — only 200 people were expected to show up to vote in-person countywide in Maricopa County on Friday, for example.

The crashes highlight a type of vulnerability in local election systems across the country — the vast majority of which operate on Microsoft Windows. That raises urgent new questions about how to prevent such meltdowns from happening during nationwide elections, especially the November presidential election, and how officials would respond in the heat of election day voting.

That’s especially true in counties, such as Maricopa and Pima, that rely entirely on electronic systems to check in voters, make sure they are eligible to vote, and print their ballots, and that no longer keep on hand printed voter rolls or pre-printed ballots. Both counties use a “vote center” model where voters can vote anywhere, which requires the use of this technology.

Maricopa replaces equipment to solve problem

The global outage was caused by a defective update released by software security company Crowdstrike that affected Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The outage was widespread across some of the world’s most critical systems, affecting hospitals, airlines, 911 calls centers, and financial institutions.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which provides election security support to local election offices nationally, has recommended the use of Crowdstrike as a tool to detect phishing attacks.

In Maricopa County, the update affected only devices that were turned on during the update, but not those that were turned off, according to county spokesperson Fields Moseley.

IT staff from all county departments started to work in the middle of the night on all of the county’s computers that were affected, Moseley said, including the polling location equipment.

The county chose to fix the problem on its unused ballot-on-demand printing systems, and then replace the equipment that was out at polling places with that updated equipment.

By 1 p.m., the county teams had 21 sites opened, and by 3 p.m., nearly all were open. They were expecting fewer than 500 voters to the 40 locations expected to be open on Saturday.

Pima County issues provisional ballots

The outage in Pima County affected the system it uses to check in voters and check their eligibility to vote, according to Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly. As a workaround, the county had poll workers call the main office to check voter information before issuing the voter a provisional ballot.

By 10:45 a.m., the issue was fixed. The county was able to connect remotely to the equipment at the polling places to fix the issue, Cázares-Kelly said.

During the outage, poll workers had voters fill out provisional ballots so that county workers would double-check their eligibility to vote before their ballot was counted.

“We have plans in place for events like this,” Cázares-Kelly said. “Our well-organized team launched a coordinated effort that allowed voters to access our services with little disruption.”

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office said Friday morning it was reaching out to provide IT support to counties.

The office emphasized in a statement that the outage did not affect vote counting in the state.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

The two Cochise County supervisors who face felony charges for allegedly attempting to interfere with the certification of the county’s midterm election recently filed documents in court that give glimpses of the secret grand jury interviews that led to their indictment.

The filings by Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, the board’s two Republicans, reveal how state prosecutors attempted to connect the supervisors’ ploy to expand the county’s hand-count audit of its election results to an alleged conspiracy to delay or prevent the county’s elections results from being certified.

The documents quote grand jury interviews in depth, providing a view into proceedings that, under state law, must be kept private. The filings were originally public records, but are now not available publicly after the state requested they be sealed. Votebeat obtained them from local independent journalist David Morgan, who got them before they were sealed.

Crosby answered the grand jury’s questions in detail, while Judd invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and did not answer a single question, according to the documents.

Crosby also blamed Democratic Supervisor Ann English, who was at the time the chairman of the board, for the board’s failure to vote on the county’s Nov. 28, 2022, deadline to canvass, or certify, the election, stating that she didn’t put the correct agenda item on the agenda. “I didn’t delay,” Crosby told the jurors, according to his court filing, “Ann English caused the delay… She misagendized what was supposed to happen on the 28th.”

Meeting minutes show that the agenda item was to certify the election, as it was 10 days prior, too, when Crosby and Judd first voted to delay the vote. But the item did not include what Crosby had requested. Prior to the vote, Crosby wanted the supervisors to hear a formal debate between the Secretary of State’s Office and “experts” on voting machines. English said in an interview Thursday that, as chairman, she didn’t create meeting agendas — the board clerk does.

Hearing from Votebeat that these two filings, which provide short snippets of a 293-page grand jury transcript, were already circulating in the public, a spokesperson for Attorney General Kris Mayes said Thursday that the office is now going to request that the entire transcript of the grand jury proceedings be made public. Mayes, a Democrat, launched the initial investigation that led to the supervisors’ indictments.

Request for case to be remanded back to grand jury

The grand jury indicted Crosby and Judd in November for one charge of conspiracy and one charge of interference of an election officer, alleging they conspired to delay the canvass of votes cast and knowingly interfered with the Arizona Secretary of State’s ability to complete the statewide canvass. Both pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in December. A trial is scheduled for May 16.

Crosby’s motion to dismiss the case filed earlier this month, which Judd joined, presents their main defense: They believe state law provides them legislative immunity from prosecution for the conversations they have and their votes during supervisors’ meetings, because they act as the county’s legislative body. Legislative immunity was intended to apply to state lawmakers, and historically has, but Crosby and Judd say it applies to county officials, too.

They also deny any illegal actions, claiming that their duty to certify the election results are discretionary. “There is no unlawful act let alone any conspiracy by Supervisors voting their conscience,” Crosby said in the document.

But if the judge decides not to dismiss the case, Crosby and Judd in the recent documents ask the judge to instead remand the case back to the grand jury because they say they weren’t given fair proceedings.

Witnesses called before the grand jury during a two-day proceeding in November included Crosby, Judd, a special agent from the Attorney General’s Office, and County Attorney Brian McIntyre, according to Judd’s filing. The transcript of the proceedings are 293 pages, according to Judd’s filing, and not public — at least for now.

The supervisors believe the state should have informed grand jurors of what they believe to be the supervisors’ legislative immunity and should have better informed the jury about the law on supervisors’ role in certifying the election. Judd also says that the state didn’t properly inform the grand jurors of her Fifth Amendment rights.

Their other main complaint is with McIntyre’s testimony, which they felt was opinionated and shouldn’t be taken as evidence. McIntyre, a Republican, advised the supervisors in November 2022 not to expand the hand-count audit and to certify the election on time.

During grand jury proceedings, Crosby said, the state allowed “misleading testimony regarding the character and aim of the hand count, infra, to further its baseless conspiracy theory that the hand count was pursued to intentionally interfere with the Secretary of State’s duty to canvass the election.”

Crosby alleges that McIntyre gave testimony to the grand jury that was full of “his baseless opinions on the law in his effort to smear his own client.”

McIntyre did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, said the office declined to comment on the documents.

From hand counting to certification

The state prosecutors and grand jurors asked the witnesses many questions about how the effort to expand the county’s post-election hand-count audit of ballots unfolded.

Cochise County supervisors were among the many across the state that faced pressure from GOP leaders and activists to conduct a full hand count of ballots, claiming without evidence that ballot tabulation machines were not accurate or properly accredited.

A judge ruled the day before the election, on Nov. 7, that the supervisors and recorder couldn’t perform a hand count of all ballots cast, since the post-election audit under state law only includes a portion of ballots. But the supervisors still wanted to expand the hand count, and took steps to prepare, even after the judge’s decision.

On Nov. 14, without voting publicly to do so, Crosby and Judd sued Elections Director Lisa Marra for blocking the expanded hand count. Residents filed open meeting law complaints to the Attorney General’s Office, saying that decision should have been made in a public vote.

Expanding the hand-count audit at this point, when the elections director was attempting to prepare for an expected statewide recount and with the supervisors’ deadline for certifying the election two weeks away, might have made it difficult for the county to certify on time.

Crosby implied that the supervisors’ hand-count decisions were what brought the grand jury to its conspiracy charge. He said in his filing the state used its witnesses to present to the grand jury “a truly ridiculous (and itself misleading) ‘conspiracy’ theory that the efforts to conduct an expanded hand count constituted a conspiracy to interfere with the Secretary of State’s duty to canvass the statewide election merely because of how long an expanded hand count might theoretically take.”

Crosby revealed new details about that time period in his filing, claiming that he and Judd had both decided independently, without speaking to each other, to consult the attorney the board chose to represent them, Bryan Blehm, during the same time period and both independently agreed to file the lawsuit against Marra.

He wrote that he was “relying on [his attorney Bryan] Blehm’s obligation to advise the board of any possible illegalities.” Blehm is a former family law attorney whose work in election law began the year prior to the midterm, in 2021, when he represented the Cyber Ninjas in the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots.

Crosby and Judd withdrew the lawsuit against Marra two days after filing it, on Nov. 16.

They then voted on Nov. 18 to delay the certification, also called a canvass, of the county’s election results, until Nov. 28. At the time, Judd stated that she wanted the hand count of 100% of ballots to back up the election results, and Crosby voted to delay the vote until the tabulation machines’ accreditation was “confirmed by persons with expertise in that field.”

After the supervisors’ second refusal to certify the canvass again on Nov. 28, the Secretary of State’s Office sued, and on Dec. 1 a court forced the supervisors to certify, prior to the Secretary of State’s deadline to certify statewide results. But Crosby didn’t show on Dec. 1, leaving Judd and English to cast the deciding “yes” votes to certify.

The recent filings do not provide the full picture of grand jury interviews.

With the release of these documents publicly, Taylor with the Attorney General’s Office said the office believes “this means the entire grand jury transcript should be released and we are going to work towards that.”

Taylor said he didn’t have an immediate timeline for when that would happen.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

The officials who run Arizona’s elections put out a blunt reminder last week: If lawmakers don’t soon change key dates related to the upcoming presidential election, military voters may get their ballots late, and results might not be delivered to Congress in time.

Their letters, addressed to Gov. Katie Hobbs and Senate President Warren Petersen, raise important questions: Why is Arizona the only state that appears to be facing this conundrum, and how can it be solved?

Votebeat’s review of election timelines and voting rules across multiple states shows a combination of factors in Arizona have created a long, unique, and unforgiving timeline for the upcoming election. Those factors include a new state law that basically guarantees recounts every election and a new federal law hardening a deadline for the presidential race, but also the state’s voter-friendly rules for mail ballots and a long timeframe for counting ballots.

Other states have a shorter mail ballot timeframe, faster counting laws, quicker certification dates, less risk of recounts — or a combination of the above — which allow them to get everything done faster, according to Votebeat’s review.

A spokesperson for the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth said even with the state’s quicker counting laws and fewer recounts, deadlines are still tight. “We are lucky we are not a swing state,” communications director Debra O’Malley said.

There are potential remedies in Arizona, and the governor may soon call a special session that would fast-track solutions. But it is proving tricky to get Republican lawmakers and county officials aligned. And they must propose changes that won’t be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

If lawmakers don’t change the timeline by March 1, the current calendar is locked in for good because of an important candidate-related deadline on March 2, said Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties.

But Hobbs didn’t mention the issue in her state of the state speech on Monday, the first day of the legislative session, which worried some who hoped it would be a priority when the session began. Maricopa County Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers sent out a statement the next day urging elected leaders in both parties to act quickly, saying “a solution cannot wait any longer.”

Not everyone sees the timeline as problematic, though. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican and former state senator who sponsored the new recount law and is now running for Maricopa County supervisor, called the issue a “red herring” and said election officials are no longer credible because of mistakes they have made running elections.

“They constantly change why they can’t do something,” she said. “They can never, ever, do their job.”

Overall, election directors say they need to compress their primary plan by 19 days to fit between the Aug. 6 primary and Sept. 21, the day general election ballots need to be sent to military voters. And they say they need to cut their general election plan by 17 days to meet a Dec. 11 presidential elector deadline. Many of the cuts would require changes to state law.

Here’s where the timeline could be tightened, and potential roadblocks.

Primary date

Widening the timeline between the primary and general election would give officials more time. Arizona’s primary election, on Aug. 6, is one of the later primaries among the states, though by far not the latest.

The county association has proposed moving it up by a week or two, to July 24 or July 30. This may be a hard sell to incumbent candidates in the state Legislature who use the time after the session ends to focus on their campaigns — including sometimes collecting contributions from lobbyists who are banned from giving during the regular session. While the session is only meant to be 100 days, last year’s was double that and didn’t end until July 31.

Spreading out the primary from the general is also seen by some political observers as benefiting more moderate general election candidates, since it provides more time after the highly partisan-charged primaries for independent voter outreach.

However, changing this date would shift all other deadlines in the primary election calendar, which could cause confusion among candidates and voters. And as the election gets closer, changing the primary date becomes less appealing for those running the election. They’ve already secured polling locations, poll workers have blocked out dates, and deadlines are looming.

“If you had asked me back in October, that would have made a lot more sense,” said Eslir Musta, elections director in northern Arizona’s Coconino County. “A lot of good things could have come out of it because we would have planned around it. Now, seven months away from the primary election, it does make me cringe.”

Scott Jarrett, elections director in Maricopa County and president of the Arizona Election Officials Association, says election officials across the state remain united in their belief that an earlier primary date is necessary to meet their deadlines.

“We are prepared to overcome any obstacles that may occur by changing the date of the Primary, including renegotiating agreements for Vote Centers and the hiring of temporary election staff,” Jarrett said. “The more quickly a decision is made on the timeline, the easier it will be to address the change and educate the public.”

Voter-friendly rules

Glancing at other states with late primaries, such as Florida on Aug. 20 and Massachusetts on Sept. 3, it’s easy to spot a major difference that allows them to get their elections done more quickly.

Under law, they have to wrap up counting quickly. In Massachusetts, the law requires the municipalities that run elections there to finish all counting on the night of the election, with some exceptions. In Florida, counties have to get all early voting results out by election night, and most day-of voting results are out then, too.

Maricopa County typically takes a few days or more to get the vast majority of ballots counted. One main reason is because Arizona allows voters to drop off mail ballots at polling places on Election Day, which then still need to be verified — and hundreds of thousands of voters used this option in 2022. On top of that, there’s a five-day cure period that allows voters to fix signature and eligibility issues.

Cutting back the mail drop-off date at polling locations, or changing the cure period, could save some days. Florida cuts off mail ballot drop-offs at polling places on the Friday before the election, and the cure period is only two days. But this type of change might be seen by some — including Hobbs — as negatively affecting voters.

Musta said election officials are wary of making changes that would “change the nature of voting.” “That’s why we are doing the work we are doing,” he said, “to serve the voters and to provide better access.”

Also built into the results timeline are a few post-election audits, including a partial hand count of ballots, which typically take a day or two.

Long timeline before certifying results

Even if a county is super quick at counting, their deadline for getting the state final results after a primary election isn’t until 14 days after the election, and the secretary of state certifies the election on or before the third Monday after the election. Other states have quicker timelines for certifying the primary, or don’t do a statewide certification at all.

The county association has proposed moving these dates forward a few days and allowing counties to send results electronically instead of physically taking them to the Secretary of State’s Office in Phoenix.

Recounting and finalizing results

A recount can begin in Arizona only once statewide results are certified. This differs from some states that do local recounts, at least, before the statewide certification. That both requires them to finish quickly, and also prevents adding days onto the timeline just for recounting.

Most states also don’t need to worry about having recounts as frequently as Arizona does, if any, because they don’t have the same automatic recount trigger. Only a handful of states have the same law as the one Arizona enacted in 2022, which triggers a recount if the difference between the winner and the runner-up was less than 0.5 percent of the total votes cast for the two candidates.

Maricopa County, at least, expects a recount after every election under the new law. If the law had been in place for the 2020 primary, one state senate race and two local contests would have been recounted. If it had been in place for the 2022 primary, two local contests would have been recounted, according to the county association.

Arizona’s 2022 statewide recount stretched out for weeks. The process starts with a court order, and then the Secretary of State’s Office goes to each county in-person to re-test their tabulation machines. The secretary’s tests took five days in 2022, but the county association is proposing cutting it to two.

Recounting the ballots took counties anywhere from a few days to a week or so, depending on the county’s size – with Pinal County taking more than two weeks.

Along with re-tabulating all ballots by machine, the counties also must re-do a post-election hand-count audit of a portion of ballots. Allowing this to happen during the machine count, or not requiring it all, would save days, according to the county association.

Only once the primary results are final, after any potential recount, can the counties design their general election ballots. The county association has proposed cutting a ballot proofing period for cities and candidates from five to two days.

The changes that would help tighten the timeline between the primary and general would also help after the general election. To tighten the general election plan further, the period for candidates to challenge their results could be reduced from five to three days after the statewide certification.

County officials are willing to negotiate, Marson said, as long as it gets them the extra days they need.

“This is not the year for trying,” Marson said. “This is the year to figure it out.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Attorney General Kris Mayes on Wednesday announced that an Arizona grand jury has indicted Cochise County Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd for conspiracy and interference with an election officer, both felonies.

Crosby and Judd, the two Republicans on the three-member board of the southern Arizona county, both refused to certify, or canvass, the county’s election by the Nov. 28, 2022 deadline in state law, twice voting against the canvass.

The Nov. 27 indictments in Maricopa County Superior Court came after the supervisors were ordered to appear at a state grand jury hearing on Nov. 13, under subpoenas issued by Mayes’ office in October. Judd’s subpoena was first reported by Votebeat.

The indictment alleges that on or between Oct. 11, 2022 and Dec. 1, 2022, Judd and Crosby “conspired to delay the canvass of votes cast” and “knowingly interfered with the Arizona Secretary of State’s ability to complete the statewide canvass,” according to a news release from the Attorney General’s Office.

“The repeated attempts to undermine our democracy are unacceptable,” Mayes wrote. “I took an oath to uphold the rule of law, and my office will continue to enforce Arizona’s elections laws and support our election officials as they carry out the duties and responsibilities of their offices.”

Judd and Crosby did not immediately respond to calls for comment Wednesday. But lawyer Dennis Wilenchik, who is representing Crosby, told Votebeat that the indictment has no basis to it and is “political and part of the democratic party playbook to win elections and target conservative republicans.”

“It is not based in fact, would never be brought in a fair and objective AG office, and was brought for some obvious purpose having nothing to do with any legitimate enforcement of the law by the AG that I can see,” Wilenchik wrote in an email.

As the 2024 election approaches, many Cochise residents and voting rights groups such as All Voting is Local said they are hoping this serves as a deterrent for any county supervisors across the state who would consider attempting to interfere with the election.

“This sends a message that you will not be held harmless,” said All Voting is Local’s Arizona director Alex Gulotta. “I really believe it may change people’s behavior.”

Cochise residents who were concerned about the certification fight in November celebrated that the supervisors were being held accountable.

Elisabeth Tyndall, chair of the Cochise County Democratic Party, praised Mayes, also a Democrat, for launching the investigation. She said it wasn’t clear in November if anyone in the state would protect voters, who were afraid the certification delay meant their votes wouldn’t be counted.

“When this first happened a lot of us felt very helpless because there was nowhere to go with this,” Tyndall said. “I think people just have a really huge sense of relief that there is someone else out there that is watching and paying attention.”

Conspiracy and interference with an election officer are both class 5 felonies in Arizona, punishable with up to two and a half years in jail.

Along with refusing to certify the election, Crosby and Judd also voted to fully hand-count the county’s election results through its post-election audit, which a judge blocked after finding that was illegal. The efforts put the rural county in the national media spotlight and caused the elections director to eventually resign citing harassment. Those efforts may have been one of the topics of the investigation but were not part of Wednesday’s indictments.

Mayes investigates at the request of Secretaries of State

Shortly after the supervisors refused to certify the election last November, Kori Lorick, then the state elections director working for former secretary of state and now Gov. Katie Hobbs asked Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate. When now-Secretary of State Adrian Fontes took office, he made the same request to Mayes, according to a letter obtained by Votebeat.

“My office considers their failure to do their non-discretionary statutory duty to canvass the election a matter of utmost importance for future elections,” Fontes wrote.

On Wednesday, he sent a one-word tweet about the indictments: “Good.”

In a statement to Votebeat he said that “Accountability is crucial in matters concerning our democracy.”

Former Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat, and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, a Republican, also wrote Brnovich and Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre asking them to investigate, writing that the supervisors’ actions threatened “to undo the proper administration and integrity of elections, disenfranchise thousands of voters and potentially even alter the results of some races.”

Cochise was the only county to bend to pressure from GOP leaders and activists from across the state who immediately after Election Day began claiming the results were inaccurate and asking county supervisors not to certify the election. Lawsuits from three Republican statewide candidates — gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh, and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — challenging the election results were eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence.

The indictment says that Crosby and Judd “knowingly interfered with the efforts” of then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now governor, to complete the canvass of the election by preventing the board from canvassing within the time period required by law.

For the conspiracy charge, the indictment says that Judd and Crosby agreed with “one or more persons,” who aren’t named in the indictment, that at least one of them would delay the canvass and the transmission of the canvass to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Under Arizona law, county supervisors must vote to certify, or canvass, their county’s election within 20 days of a general election. It’s a ministerial act, which means supervisors have no discretion as to whether to approve the results. The only exception is if there are any missing returns among polling place results — and even that only warrants a temporary postponement. The secretary of state, in turn, is required to certify the statewide election on the fourth Monday after the election.

Crosby and Judd initially voted to postpone the county’s canvass until the Nov. 28 deadline, after residents spread unfounded claims that ballot tabulation machines used throughout the state were not properly certified. Kori Lorick, the state elections director, then personally provided documentation to the supervisors showing the machines were certified.

When the final deadline of Nov. 28 arrived, Crosby and Judd voted against certification. They did so against the advice of the County Attorney’s Office, which had explained to them that they had a non-discretionary duty.

The Secretary of State’s Office, at the time run by Hobbs, then sued the supervisors, who had to rely on private counsel to represent them on the matter because they had acted against the county attorney’s advice. Their attorney did not appear in court. The trial court judge then forced them to reconvene and vote to certify.

They did, but the vote was still 2-0: Crosby did not show up.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, both Republicans, were served subpoenas last week by Mayes’ office explaining that they are under investigation and ordering them to appear before the state grand jury on Nov. 13, according to a Votebeat review of Judd’s subpoena and a Herald Review report of Crosby’s subpoena. Judd’s subpoena has not been previously reported.

The subpoenas do not specify the criminal violations that the office is investigating. But Cochise County Supervisor Ann English, the third member of the three-member board and the only Democrat, told Votebeat that she was interviewed Tuesday by an investigator from Mayes’ office who asked her about Crosby and Judd’s refusal to certify the election, along with their push to hand-count all ballots during the county’s post-election audit.

Trial court judges deemed both actions illegal at the time, forcing the officials to vote to certify and blocking the full hand count of ballots. English, who had voted to certify and against moving forward with the full hand count, said she has not been served with a subpoena.

Mayes’ office said it could not divulge the topic of any grand jury investigation, citing a state law that prohibits discussion of grand jury matters.

Mayes’ probe of the southern Arizona county’s attempts to disrupt the midterm election results could deter county officials who may want to do the same during the upcoming presidential election. Former state Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat who had called for an investigation on the supervisors’ refusal to certify the election, was glad to hear it was underway.

“Elected officials don’t just get to pick the laws they want to follow,” he told Votebeat.

The grand jury process is the only way that Arizona law allows attorney generals to pursue a criminal prosecution. It will be up to a grand jury of nine to 16 citizens to decide whether to indict the supervisors. It’s a felony in Arizona for an elections officer to knowingly refuse to perform a duty prescribed to them under state law, or to act in violation of state law. This could be a Class 3 or Class 6 felony, which carry potential jail time and fines.

Lisa Marra, Cochise County’s elections director during the midterm, called Mayes’ investigation “important.” Crosby and Judd sued her personally last year, alleging she was attempting to prevent the full hand count. It’s part of what led her to resign.

“The lesson now is if people or voters or counties violate laws, they will be investigated and prosecuted if it rises to that legal threshold,” Marra, who now works for Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, said in an interview this week. Marra said she hasn’t been interviewed or subpoenaed by Mayes’ office.

Judd said she doesn’t regret her actions, but she does feel misled by the outside legal advice she received from private attorneys. “They all used me,” she said. “And it makes me sad.”

She said she now knows the law and would act differently when faced with a similar decision in 2024.

“I don’t regret a single minute or single word,” she said. “I just know now what’s possible and what’s not possible, and I refuse to go there.”

Crosby did not respond to messages asking him to confirm the subpoena and for comment. It’s unclear whether any other county officials were subpoenaed or interviewed. Marra said she has not been.

Cochise supervisors swayed by GOP push

Cochise was the only county to bend to pressure from GOP leaders and activists from across the state who immediately after Election Day began claiming the results were inaccurate and asking county supervisors not to certify the election. Lawsuits from gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh, and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem challenging the election results were eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Under Arizona law, county supervisors must vote to certify, or canvass, their county’s election within 20 days of a general election. It’s a ministerial act, which means supervisors have no discretion as to whether to approve the results. The only exception is if there are any missing returns among polling place results — and even that only warrants a temporary postponement. The secretary of state, in turn, is required to certify the statewide election on the fourth Monday after the election.

Crosby and Judd first voted to postpone the county’s canvass until the Nov. 28 deadline, after residents spread unfounded claims that ballot tabulation machines used throughout the state were not properly certified. Kori Lorick, the state elections director, personally provided documentation to the supervisors showing the machines were certified, yet still Judd said at the time that it was “alarming that there was something going on.”

Crosby was also dismissive of Lorick.

“Is she of higher and greater importance than our citizens?” Crosby said.

When the final deadline of Nov. 28 arrived, Crosby and Judd voted against certification. They did so against the advice of the County Attorney’s Office, which had explained to them that they had a non-discretionary duty.

The Secretary of State’s Office, at the time run by now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, then sued the supervisors, who could only rely on private counsel to represent them on the matter, since they had acted against the county attorney’s advice. Their attorney did not appear in court. The trial court judge then forced them to reconvene and vote to certify. They did, but the vote was still 2-0: Crosby did not show up.

Crosby and Judd had also, just prior to the election on Oct. 24, voted to expand the limited post-election hand-count audit of ballots required under state law to a hand count of all ballots.

They did so after a GOP pressure campaign to end the use of tabulation machines, and it was also against the advice of the county attorney, who explicitly said their plan would be illegal.

In fact, Judd said at the time that she was aware she “might go to jail” for her vote.

A judge blocked the plan the day before the election. Yet, for a moment, it appeared County Recorder David Stevens was moving forward anyway when he went around Marra and took the first steps towards a hand-count audit. Stevens’ count never came to be, though.

A state appeals court last week upheld the trial court’s decision that a full hand-count audit is illegal.

Mayes has also opened an investigation into five open meeting law violations by the county supervisors, three of them related to elections. One alleged violation was Crosby and Judd’s decision to sue Marra. The two hired a lawyer to sue her without voting on the matter at a public meeting. They later dropped the lawsuit.

It’s unlikely that Mayes would bring the open meeting law investigations to a grand jury, as state law gives Mayes the power to fine officials for open meeting law violations without a grand jury proceeding.

Judd said she now understands that she should have drawn a firmer line. “When the laws are different and the world is different, maybe we can have hand counting and all the stuff you want,” she said. “But sometimes you just need to say no.”

English said a Mayes investigator questioned her for about 15 minutes on both the refusal to certify and the lawsuit related to the push to hand-count all ballots. One of the questions, she said, was about how many times her fellow supervisors refused to certify before the judge forced them to.

The grand jury subpoena told Crosby and Judd that they will be asked questions and may be asked to produce records and documents. They were advised they can have an attorney present to represent them.

Judd said that County Attorney Brian McIntyre has told her he will not represent her.

Under state law, public officials and employees can’t be held personally liable for following the advice of their attorney. But in this case, the supervisors went against the county attorney’s advice.

Former prosecutors call for investigation

Mayes’ investigation of Crosby and Judd comes as she also investigates the state’s fake electors plot to overturn the 2020 election results. Her investigation has expanded to consider Trump allies’ pressures on local elected officials, according to The Washington Post.

Mayes first took office in January. Her predecessor, former Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich had not opened an investigation into these matters.

Brnovich was in his final months in office during the midterm disruptions in Cochise County. Shortly after, on Dec. 2, Lorick, then the state elections director — working for former secretary of state and now Gov. Katie Hobbs—- wrote him a letter asking him to investigate Crosby and Judd’s failure to certify in a timely manner and hold them accountable.

“Had a court not intervened, the failure of these two Supervisors to uphold their duty would have disenfranchised thousands of Cochise County voters,” Lorick wrote. “This blatant act of defying Arizona’s election laws risks establishing a dangerous precedent that we must discourage.”

Goddard and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, a Republican, also wrote Brnovich and Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre asking them to investigate, writing that the supervisors’ actions threatened “to undo the proper administration and integrity of elections, disenfranchise thousands of voters and potentially even alter the results of some races.”

In an interview this week, Romley said he thinks the public is tired of the “circus performances” surrounding the state’s elections.

“They want their elected officials to be the grownups in the room, to do what is right for their system and to bring stability and honesty for their government,” he said.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.