After county’s rocky primary, Tuesday is big test
On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters will head to polling places across Maricopa County to cast ballots in races that could dramatically alter the course of Arizona politics.
The only person under more pressure than the politicians on the ballot is Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who is responsible for facilitating a successful election — something he didn’t fully accomplish during the August primary.
More than 60 polling places across the county weren’t operational for hours on Aug. 28 because voter check-in machines weren’t set up in time, according to an investigation by The Arizona Republic.
Polling places that were operable were vastly understaffed and plagued with technical difficulties and incorrect instructions from poll workers — the result of poor training.
A critical culmination of issues gave way to a disastrous couple of hours. But by the afternoon, all polling places were open and most of the other significant problems were resolved.
“I feel great. Are there still things I’m chewing my fingernails about a little bit? A little bit.” Adrian Fontes Maricopa County recorder
By that night, a record number of voters, about 142,000 more than the 2016 primary, had cast ballots in the county. This led Fontes to call the election a “success.”
“We broke huge records,” Fontes said in an interview with The Republic. “There were parts of the system that got improved and performed in magnificent ways.”
Many disagreed with his characterization, and the recorder has faced immense pressure from other elected officials and voters to ensure November’s election goes off without a hitch.
Fontes has made some changes to election procedures since August but has chosen to disregard other expert recommendations to improve the process.
It’s a gamble he’s hoping pays off — both for voters and for himself.
Fontes has promised voters that November’s election will be better. He said every primary election is a “dry run for the general” election, “because you haven’t had a big election like that for two years.”
“I feel great. Are there still things I’m chewing my fingernails about a little bit? A little bit. We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Fontes said in an interview three weeks before the election.
Fontes has repeatedly insisted that the major issue during the August elections — the voting equipment that wasn’t set up on time — wasn’t his office’s fault.
He’s blamed a contractor hired to set up the equipment. The contractor blames the county’s poor planning.
But the problems during the primary didn’t stem only from the late setup.
The Republic reviewed internal and external reports, auditor reviews, pollworker surveys and emails from the weeks leading up to the election, in addition to interviewing current and former Recorder’s Office employees, poll workers, elected officials and voters, to determine what went wrong at polling places on Aug. 28.
It wasn’t a single issue, but several, that marred the voting process.
Here are the main issues that occurred during the primary, how they happened, what (if anything) has been done to fix them and what risk still exists on Tuesday.
Poll-worker shortage
At least one in three polling places were understaffed on primary election day, according to data from the Recorder’s Office.
The Recorder’s Office didn’t begin hiring for the Aug. 28 election until the end of July. By comparison, 58 percent of poll workers were hired by Aug. 1 in 2016, according to a Recorder’s Office document.
Fontes confirmed that his office was still hiring in the days leading up to the primary election.
About 2,800 temporary election employees were hired for the primary. For the larger general election, Fontes said, the office will need 4,000.
The office started recruiting for the general election in mid-September, giving staff a few more weeks to hire than it had for the primary, according to Fontes.
The Recorder’s Office is upping its recruiting efforts and attempting to recruit workers from new places, like high schools and colleges, Fontes said in September.
One week before the election, the Recorder’s Office had hired at least 3,951 temporary election workers out of the 4,000 goal, according to information provided by the office.
“If we haven’t hired everyone yet, we’re getting really darn close,” Fontes said. “We’re on track to have everyone hired.”
Helen Purcell, the previous county recorder, and Karen Osborne, the previous elections director, said they always faced shortages of poll workers during their tenure. Staffing problems on election day are normal, they said.
Purcell served as recorder from 1989 to 2017, and Osborne served as assistant election director from 1991 to 1995 and director from 1995 to 2017.
“Somebody isn’t going to show up for work, and somebody is going to forget the keys,” Osborne said. “So it’s paramount that you go after, and after and after, the polling-place workers.”
Inadequate training
After the primary, Fontes said some of the issues stemmed from inadequate poll-worker training. The office allowed some poll workers to take online training, instead of the traditional in-person training. The online training consisted of a packet and PowerPoint. Fontes said the workers either didn’t do it or it didn’t work.
Fontes initially said all poll workers would receive in-person training. He’s since walked that back.
Only troubleshooters, inspectors and some judges — the poll workers who handle the technology and have the biggest responsibilities on Election Day — are receiving in-person training, which will include a hands-on demonstration on how to install the voter check-in system. In-person training is still not required for clerks, the election workers with the lightest responsibility.
The online training has been expanded and all training has been augmented to include pieces that may have been missing, like what poll workers should do in the event a voter check-in machine is not set up or is malfunctioning.
As of nine days before the election, 1,074 workers had been trained in person since the primary election and 1,755 had completed the new online training, according to information provided by the Recorder’s Office.
Osborne said training is critical when you introduce new technology into the mix, as Fontes has.
“You can pay $1,000 for a toaster, but if no one shows you how to plug it in, you’re not going to get toast,” she said.
Polling places not set up
At 6 a.m. on Aug. 28, the voter checkin machines, or “SiteBooks,” at 62 polling places were not set up and ready to accept voters.
When poll workers attempted to call the Recorder’s Office to report that their equipment has not been set up, some were placed on hold for more than an hour.
The Recorder’s Office hired a contractor — Insight Enterprises — to set up the SiteBooks. The Recorder’s Office contends Insight did not supply the required number of contractors to install the equipment on time. Insight disputes this. According to a report from the Recorder’s Office, the office knew the setup schedule was falling behind at 1:10 p.m. on Monday. The last polling place opened at 11:33 a.m. on election day, more than five hours after polls were supposed to open.
Emails between county staffers and Insight in the month leading up to the election show that a lack of planning by the Recorder’s Office may have played a significant role in the setup issues. Insight claims the county did not confirm setup times with all of the polling places, so some technicians could not access the sites and set up the equipment in a prompt manner the day before the election.
The county will not use Insight — or any outside contractor — to set up the voter check-in machines on Nov. 6. The
When voters arrived at one of the 62 polling places where the voter check-in machines weren’t yet set up, there was no backup plan to allow voters to access a ballot and vote in a different way — or, if there was, poll workers were not trained to facilitate it.
There were 40 “vote centers” across the Valley where any registered voter could cast a ballot. Voters could have gone to one of those if their polling place was not set up or was malfunctioning. Fontes has referred to this as the backup plan. But poll workers often did not properly communicate that with voters, according to interviews with voters.
Those who were told to go to a vote center were frustrated at having to go to another location.
Fontes originally told the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors that he would provide printed voter rolls at polling places as backup for the general election, but he later walked that back in an interview with The Republic. Now, he said, his office plans to email a PDF of paper voter rolls — a master list of all registered voters — to government officials across the Valley. If the power goes out at a polling place, the local government entities can print the voter rolls and deliver them to impacted polling place. Poll workers can then check in voters by hand.
The voter check-in machines have an “offline mode” that will allow voters to continue accessing ballots even if the wireless connectivity goes down at a polling place. Fontes said this mode was available during the primary, but it was not effectively communicated to poll workers. It will be highlighted during the augmented training.
Poll workers will have printouts of the vote-center locations they can distribute to voters if they need to reroute them to another location.
If poll workers do not understand the backup plans or do not properly communicate them to voters, the same issues could occur again.
Technology malfunctions
Contractors had trouble connecting the SiteBooks to a mobile router, and contractors at about 30 polling places had trouble finding internet signals, or the right internet signal, to connect to.
Poll workers also experienced a host of other technology problems, including cracked SiteBook screens and problems with printers, toner and ink.
The Recorder’s Office is testing equipment ahead of time and placed stickers on the back of SiteBooks explaining how to connect the equipment.
The office nearly doubled the number of technical staff available to respond to issues in November. There were 85 troubleshooters in August, and now there are 125 troubleshooters and 40 additional technical staff, Fontes said.
Fontes said smaller technology issues occur during every election, but this time around the county should be able to address these problems quickly.
He said the technology issues in August wouldn’t have been a big deal had locations been set up on time. But because of the setup struggles, troubleshooters were unable to quickly respond to locations with smaller problems.
“We got the problems solved,” Fontes said. “We just didn’t get them solved as quickly as we would have liked.”
With more troubleshooters and more people taking emergency phone calls from polling places, there should be more people on hand to address issues.
Are all elections doomed?
Some of the issues with the voting system are systemic and predate Fontes’ tenure.
It was only two years ago, under the direction of the last county recorder, Purcell, that tens of thousands of voters were frustrated by long lines, causing more than 100,000 to walk away from the polls without casting ballots.
Even after running elections for more than 20 years, Purcell and Osborne made major gaffes at the end of their tenure that surely changed the way voters will remember their legacy.
Asked why the county can’t get elections right, Osborne said elections have “millions of moving parts.” Coupled with the sheer number of voters and precincts, something is bound to go wrong, she said.
“It’s like a large jigsaw puzzle you put together,” Osborne said. “It’s very hard.”
The 2016 presidential preference election likely cost Republican Purcell her job. Democrat Fontes campaigned heavily on her election flub, and it worked.
But after his own August primary gaffe — Fontes’ first major statewide election since he was elected — some have questioned whether anyone can get Maricopa County elections on track.
Some believe the county hasn’t properly funded its elections, which leads to cutbacks in staffing, which ultimately leads to problems on Election Day.
“In the United States, our elections have been woefully underfunded for a long time,” said Marian Schneider, president of nonpartisan election watchdog group Verified Voting. “By not funding it properly, they undermine confidence in our democracy.”
Fontes initially told the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which allocates funding to the Recorder’s Office, that the primary election problems did not stem from a “dollars and cents issue.”
In a follow-up meeting with the board, he told the supervisors that he would soon request additional funding for more employees to handle voter registration, but not additional money for the Election Day process.
Last year, the county spent nearly $4 million to purchase about 2,000 additional voter check-in machines and 60 printers for the vote centers.
For the fiscal year that runs from July 2018 to June 2019, the board allocated the Recorder’s Office almost $20 million for elections. The board allocated the Recorder’s Office $21 million for the 2016 presidential elections.
“I don’t think it’s a funding issue at all, and our auditors certainly haven’t come back with that,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Steve Chucri said.
Asked whether money was an issue during her tenure, Purcell pointed to the 2016 presidential preference election, when her office cut back on polling places to save money, leading to the longer lines.
It was an anomaly, Purcell said. The Legislature cut $2.4 million from the funding to provide for the presidential preference election.
“We had a wonderful rapport with our Board of Supervisors,” she said. “So if we went to (the board) with a plan to do something, if that plan meant we had to spend more money, they were nine
times out of 10 willing to make whatever funds available they possibly could.”
The supervisors haven’t had the same response to all of Fontes’ requests.
Fontes wanted to do away with traditional polling places altogether and rely solely on a smaller number of vote centers — where any registered voter in the county can cast a ballot.
Chucri said the board wasn’t concerned about the cost of transitioning to a vote-center model. Rather, the supervisors didn’t think the county was ready for such a “drastic change.”
They declined his request but did allow Fontes to operate a combination of vote centers and traditional polling places, as he did in August and will do again in November.
However, having two types of polling sites confuses voters, Fontes said. Traditional polling places can only accept voters who live in that precinct, whereas the 40 vote centers accept any voter. That’s hard to communicate to voters, he said.
During the August primary, nearly all of the issues occurred at the traditional polling places. Only one vote center had a major issue (both ballot envelope printers went down at the same time).
“There’s so many little factors involved and there’s so many pitfalls in the old model, but we were put into the position to have the hybrid model, and so we’re doing the best we can with that,” Fontes said.
He also said he would “absolutely” like to move to an all-mail election, where all registered voters receive a ballot by mail. But that’s a decision that will have to come from the state Legislature.
During the August primary, 85 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail, according to Fontes. In November 2017, the Recorder’s Office ran all-mail elections for more than 25 cities and towns without any major issues.
Only three states conduct all elections only by mail: Oregon, Washington and Colorado.
Colorado was the most recent, adopting all-mail elections in 2013.
Pam Anderson, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the state had been evolving toward an all-mail system for decades, which made the final transition fairly smooth.
She said all-mail elections are just as administratively intense as in-person voting, but it does relieve the burden of recruiting poll workers and relying on them to effectively manage increasingly technical elections.
“We’re not relying on a large number of election officials, training them and then putting them out there for one day — we call it a one-day fire sale,” Anderson said.
Osborne and Purcell said they’ve always been proponents of a vote-by-mail system.
“This county is too big to continue to piecemeal,” Osborne said. “It’s like fixing Thanksgiving dinner and everybody goes to McDonald’s ahead of time.”
Should voters trust the system?
Fontes said voters should trust that they will be able to vote and that their vote will count.
That said, he’s not guaranteeing a hiccup-free election.
“It doesn’t matter how well-prepared you are, we’re dealing with a lot of forces that we can’t control in every election scenario,” he said. “Whether it’s poll workers that don’t show up or facilities that don’t open, we have always had these problems and we will always have these problems. This is not a perfect business.”
But he said he’s comfortable with the changes his office has made since August and believes November’s election will be successful. He’s expecting, and preparing for, record turnout.
A coalition of nonpartisan votingrights groups will be monitoring polling places across Maricopa County to ensure voters are able to access their right to vote.
The Arizona Advocacy Foundation’s Joel Edman said the group is optimistic about the changes the Recorder’s Office has made to ensure a successful election.
“Voters should be confident in the system, but also hold election officials accountable when there are mistakes like there were in August,” Edman said.
Osborne said voters should not let their concerns about past mistakes worry them.
“I have enough faith in the public,” she said. “I think they are going to participate, and they are going to want to participate, and they are going to get off their duff and go register and vote.”
If you have a problem at the polls, here’s who to call:
❚ Maricopa County Recorder’s Office: 602-506-1511.
❚ Election Protection Commission: 866-OUR-VOTE.
❚ U.S. Attorney’s Office, Civil Rights Division: 800-253-3931.