Pima County made mistake when reporting vote count Friday. 1/2

Howard Fischer Nov 9, 2024 Updated 1 hr ago

When asked by a reporter how he was going to change the current tenuous situation between Mexico, Mexican drug cartels and the United States, this is what Senator JD Vance had to say at a rally in Tucson Tuesday afternoon at the Pima County Fair Grounds. Video by Kimberly Kalil, Arizona Daily Star

Pima County reported incorrect numbers of uncounted ballots on Friday, due to what county officials say was a clerical error.

The error didn’t become public until an attorney for Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake complained.

The estimated number of uncounted ballots reported by the county went up in a two-hour period Friday, Lake’s attorney Jennifer Wright pointed out in a letter to county officials.

“Kari Lake for Arizona demands that Pima County provide an immediate explanation of the discrepancies in the numbers combined with complete and accurate accounting of how the number of uncounted ballots increased between the 1:23 p.m.report and the 3:23 p.m. report,’’ she wrote to Daniel Jurkowitz, the assistant chief civil deputy in the Pima County Attorney’s Office.

That’s not the only issue.

“Even more strange than the number of uncounted ballots increasing, at one point, the report purported to be uploaded at 3:23 p.m. was initially identical to the report uploaded at 1:23 p.m.,’’ she wrote. It was only about two hours later, Wright said, that the numbers in the report were changed without changing the time stamp.

Those figures have led to criticism on X, formerly Twitter, by Lake’s campaign, which posted: “We should know what the static number of ballots to count is. Instead, it’s like an accordion.’’

“It’s a clerical error,’’ Mark Evans, a spokesman for Pima County, said Saturday. “It’s an easy explanation,’’ he said. “But in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into ‘inserted votes’.’’Fuck off liar

Evans said the posting error was due to the fact that the number of issues that went to voters required that the ballot be broken into two separate cards.

In some cases, he said, not every voter returned both cards. So the number of cards being counted isn’t always double the number of ballots.

What happened here is related to that two-card issue, Evans said.

“When we reported the numbers to the secretary of state we read the wrong line,’’ he said. “We reported the number of cards we had counted rather than the number of ballots we had counted. So we reported we had counted 30,687, but that was the number of cards.”

By contrast, he said, the number of ballots actually counted was 15,492.

“So when we caught it, Constance (Hargrove, the county’s elections director) asked staff to correct it when they reported the second batch of results,’’ Evans said. That new tally — the one at 3:23 p.m. — also included a smaller batch that had since been processed.

https://tucson.com/news/local/government-politics/elections/pima-couny-clerical-error-reporting-ballot-count-fuels-kari-lake-mistrust/article_51a3af60-9eca-11ef-b68b-a341105413a8.html