Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly (right) speaks at a voting information session on May 3, 2024 in Tucson, Ariz.
Supervisor Steve Christy’s effort to investigate Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly for potential election law violations failed in a 4-1 vote.
On Oct. 19, the Recorder’s Office shut down an online portal to request an early ballot, six days before the deadline to request one on Oct. 25. They alerted about 4,000 people who had their request denied with an email to call the Recorder’s Office to check their status instead.
Cázares-Kelly told the supervisors at Tuesday’s meeting that the incident was “a culmination of a lot of different situations,” that began with an error in certain school district boundaries discovered by the County Treasurer’s Office.
When the boundaries were adjusted, there was a misunderstanding in how mapping data from the county’s Geographic Information System impacts the Elections’ Department and the Recorder’s Office that was not realized until right before a printing deadline, said Cázares-Kelly.
“Our list was due at 6 p.m. and I got a phone call at 5 p.m. from the Treasurer to alert us of these changes that put an immediate hold on all of the data that we were trying to send to the printers at that time,” Cázares-Kelly said.
In an Oct. 13 press release, Recorder’s Office officials said the situation led to a two to three day delay in voters receiving their ballots.
Cázares-Kelly said the chain of delays caused some to worry they weren’t actually on the active early voter list, and the decision to shut down the request form was due to an overwhelming number of duplicate requests from people who already had a ballot in the mail.
“60% of the voters who had a pending request, were ones that were already being fulfilled. The majority of those voters were taking up time from my staff to serve the voters who actually needed those ballots,” she said.
Christy also questioned Cázares-Kelly on the decision to not publicize the move.
Deputy Recorder Marion Chubon told the Tucson Sentinel they didn’t alert the media of the decision because they “didn’t think it was a story.”
Cázares-Kelly said her office wanted to avoid creating panic in an already tense election season.
“It's important to know we were getting angry phone calls about where people's ballots were back in August,” she said. “The amount of stress and anxiety that people were having, was already unreal.”
Christy said an investigation is necessary because state law requires ballots to be sent within 48 hours of an early voter request and that the slim margins of certain county races could have been impacted by the decision.
“The numbers of voters that potentially could have been disenfranchised and suppressed here, which we do not know at this point, could very well have affected those votes and affected those elections,” Christy said.
Cázares-Kelly said the County Attorney’s Office told them the move was legal, but they are working with elections officials to gauge if any voters were unable to cast a ballot due to the decision.
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