Concerned about allegations of wrongdoing and voter disenfranchisement in Pinal County’s 2022 election, State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), chair of the Senate Election Committee, sent the county a public records request demanding printout logs from the election. She asked for several reports/logs.
Rogers requested EL52, known as the Canvassing Report; EL30A, which is the Precinct Level Report with Detail; and EL45A, known as the Election Summary Report with Detail. She also requested EL68A, known as the System Log; EL192A, which is the Audit Log for the Tabulators; and the Full Event Service Log for the entire duration of administration of the 2022 General Election.
“Given the importance of free, fair, and transparent elections and the public’s skepticism regarding the conduct of recent elections, I am seeking production of these documents on an expedited basis,” the state senator said.
She gave the county a deadline of 10 days to produce the documents, warning, “Any deletion of said public documents can give rise to a negative inference in a court of law.”
Shelby Busch, co-founder of We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), said the reports and logs should help determine whether ballots were misidentified as blank, a known problem in Florida and Georgia this past election. “Pinal County had an extraordinarily high number of ‘blank’ ballots logged on the canvass,” she told The Arizona Sun Times. “They claim they were the second ballots, but after the recount for Abe Hamadeh, the numbers dropped by more than 2,000 ballots. ESS has been identified as having a virtual ‘drawer 3.’ When the system can’t recognize the vote markings, the ballots are misidentified as blank. This occurred and was proven in Florida and Georgia. These reports will help us to determine if the same issue happened in Arizona.”
Undervotes — votes that the voting machine tabulators failed to record — were found after the 2022 election in the county, which resulted in narrowing Abe Hamadeh’s defeat by Kris Mayes in the attorney general’s race to only 280 votes. Then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs withheld evidence of the undervotes from Hamadeh and the public, so he was unable to address it during his election contest trial last December. He is appealing based on this withheld evidence.
Additionally, WPAA conducted extensive interviews with voters who were forced to vote provisional ballots due to their addresses being mysteriously changed to other counties on their voter registrations, who discovered that their votes were never counted. They discovered that 70 percent of the hundreds of rejected provisional ballots were from Republicans or right-leaning independents, causing WPAA to believe Hamadeh really won the election.
The CONELRAD Group, composed of former military and law enforcement officers, recently released a lengthy report that found malfeasance and possible criminal wrongdoing in the county’s 2022 election.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Voting Booths” by Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
