Report on vote woes won’t be released
Fontes backtracks, says lawyers guided decision
Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes will no longer release a report he promised would answer questions about election-day problems, he told The Arizona Republic on Thursday afternoon.
Fontes had said during a Tuesday Facebook Live video that the report would be released to the public by Thursday.
Attorneys for the Recorder’s Office encouraged him not to release the report, Fontes said.
Instead, he handed over the report to county auditors who are reviewing the election-day debacle.
On election day, polling places were not ready to open at 6 a.m., when voting was set to begin. The issue affected 95 precincts and thousands of voters, according to a Republic investigation.
Additionally, voters and poll work-
ers reported many other seemingly unrelated issues, including workers who felt unprepared for their responsibilities, voters receiving incorrect ballots and other concerns about the security of ballots.
The cause of the issues is unclear. Fontes initially blamed an information-technology contractor that he said did not provide the required support for the voter check-in equipment. The contractor denies this.
Fontes has said his office’s contract and communication with the contractor will “flesh out” the truth.
The Recorder’s Office has not yet complied with a week-old public-records request from The Republic for that correspondence. Fontes, since election day, has refused to answer The Republic’s questions about the problems. The recorder is an elected position. Fontes, a Democrat, successfully ran on a campaign that criticized Republican Helen Purcell after she faced unrelated voting issues as county recorder.
On Tuesday afternoon, in the unannounced Facebook Live video, Fontes said he would release a report this week that would answer questions and provide a timeline of the issues that occurred. “We had some problems,” he said in the video. “We didn’t deliver for all of our voters.”
In the video, Fontes said he has not responded to media questions because he wanted to make sure he had all the information to supply a complete answer. He also said he would prefer to speak directly to voters through methods such as Facebook Live and the report he will release.
“We’re not going to worry about politics and name calling-and blame-casting,” he said. “We’re not going to worry about headlines. We’re going to worry about getting you the information directly from us so that we can continue to be transparent, which we have been since I got elected.”
He reiterated this on Wednesday, when the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors grilled him on his handling of the elections.
The county supervisors, who do not have direct oversight of the Recorder’s Office but do allocate funding for the office, met Wednesday to finalize election results and discuss the issues.
The supervisors voted unanimously to spend up to $200,000 on external auditors who will assist the county’s audit team in reviewing what went wrong on election day. Auditors will suggest fixes to ensure the issues don’t occur during November’s general election, when turnout is expected to be much higher.
Fontes, a Democrat, successfully ran on a campaign that criticized Republican Helen Purcell after she faced unrelated voting issues as county recorder.