Glendale voter exposes problem when she gets 2 ballots in mail
Evelyn Hendrick has been a committed voter for decades.
Last week, her ballot for the special election to fill the vacant 8th Congressional District seat arrived in the mail — two of them, in fact.
It was a mistake, Maricopa County election officials say, apparently caused when the 75-year-old woman renewed her driver’s license last year and transposed numbers in her birth date.
It also exposed a potential problem that county officials acknowledged may have gone undetected if not for Hendrick’s inquiries.
“This anomaly which occurred is that Evelyn has two records on file,” said Reynaldo “Rey” Valenzuela, the county’s elections director.
The county’s computers search for exact matches to indicate whether someone is already in the system. The machines are not as effective at identifying people with near matches as likely to be associated with the same person, he said. This is especially the case for older registrations that didn’t originally include Social Security numbers, too.
“The ‘hard match’ says, ‘Is there an Evelyn Hendrick with this date of birth, with this driver license, this Social Security number?’ And the answer is ‘no,’ so it creates another record . ... She was treated as two different persons,” Valenzuela said.
Adrian Fontes, the county recorder, called this type of mistake “very, very rare.” And the odds of it occurring will be minimized further with an upgraded computer system that draws from more databases and is expected to come online later this year, he said.
The quick turnaround to fill the seat that Trent Franks resigned in December also meant that county officials didn’t have the time to do everything they normally would to ensure ballot accuracy.
They didn’t, for example, send voters cards in the mail that might have prompted a question from someone like Hendrick, who would have gotten two ballots.
As it was, Fontes praised Hendrick for reaching out to help identify the error when she spotted something unusual.
While it might seem suspicious to send ballots to two people with the same name, at the same address, officials said such things do happen with parents and identically-named children, even some with similar birth dates.
County officials, who learned of the situation after Hendrick reached out to
The Arizona Republic, said they already programmed their ballot-counting machines to tally the first ballot they get from Hendrick but not the second, if they should get one.
Hendrick said the situation raised concerns about officials’ ability to ensure voting and election integrity.
“I would have never done it,” Hendrick said of the potential to submit two votes in the special election. “I knew from the beginning there had to be some kind of mistake.”
The issue is a soft reminder of the hard-edged debate over voting and election integrity.
Arizona was among 21 states that Russian operatives tried to hack in the 2016 elections, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Officials have not said the hackers succeeded.
In August 2016, the FBI notified Arizona of a hacking attempt on the state voter-registration database after a Gila County employee opened an infected email attachment.
At the time, state officials took the voter-registration system off-line for about 10 days to make sure hackers hadn’t breached the system.
State officials at the time indicated they thought Russia may have been behind that effort. U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last fall said he thought Russia may have targeted Arizona because he
is a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Last summer, the Trump administration tried to create a vast voter database by requesting the rolls of every state. That effort collapsed after state officials, including those in Arizona, refused to hand over information that in some cases state laws prohibited them from sharing.
While there’s little chance an extra vote from someone like Hendrick could tip the election to replace Franks, election officials had a close brush with a fluke outcome in 2016.
In that case, Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for the congressional seat that includes the East Valley initially by nine votes. After legal proceedings that resulted in some previously excluded votes being tallied, Biggs officially won the race by 16 votes out of 86,000 cast.
Special elections typically draw light turnout, so the race for Franks’ former seat is likely to be settled by fewer voters than those who cast ballots in the Biggs race. The Republican field has 12 candidates, splintering the support of whoever wins that primary.