PINAL COUNTY, AZ — Pinal County officials are investigating a printing error that resulted in incorrect ballots in two precincts.
The Pinal County Recorder’s Office was made aware of a possible issue on Saturday, with a voter reporting that the ballot they received was incorrect.
An investigation was immediately launched, and officials “determined that the vendor for the Secretary of State’s voter registration database had pulled incorrect information.”
They found 1,468 ballots had printing errors, and that the errors impacted only precinct committeeman races.
“We are in the process of notifying Republican voters in precincts 28 and 136 who will be issued replacement ballots,” county officials say.
Voters with a phone number on record are being notified through the text emergency notification system, but anyone with questions is asked to contact the Pinal County Citizen Contact Center at 311 or 520-509-3555.
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The Arizona Secretary of State's Office released the following statement about the incident on Monday morning:
“The Office of the Secretary of State is responsible for maintaining and helping operate the overall voter registration system (AVID) for 13 of our 15 counties.
The counties themselves are responsible for the data, its accuracy and deployment, verifying any information coming into or out of the system or sent to an individual county’s contracted mail processing vendor.
By law, the counties are also responsible for the accuracy of ballots.
In May of this year, Cochise and Yuma counties identified an issue during their ballot proofing for the primary election that they brought to the attention of the SOS and other counties. Specifically, those counties found that voter registration mailing data in the AVID system was sometimes not aligning correctly in precincts with ballot styles that contained contested partisan precinct committee (PC) races.
The SOS voter registration team worked with the AVID contracted vendor to implement a code fix in May to correct the issue prospectively, and this code fix was communicated to counties on May 27 in a regular “Superuser” meeting that all counties attend. Information about this issue was also communicated in subsequent emails.
Additionally, after the May 27 meeting, SOS staff reached out directly by phone to all 3 counties impacted - Cochise, Yuma and Pinal - and advised them to make adjustments to their data to implement the code fix correction, and double-check the accuracy of their ballots. The SOS voter registration staff offered assistance with this process as needed.
It appears that the code fix and/or other preventive measures resulted in correct ballots being sent out in the other counties (Cochise and Yuma) so the impact is limited to Pinal County.
The Secretary’s Office stands ready to help Pinal County or any county in need of remedial support or improvement in their own data input/retrieval and use protocols.”
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