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Maricopa County Recorder Fontes Won't Release Election Report Until Attorney Review

screen shot from facebook video by Adrian Fontes
Adrian Fontes Maricopa County Recorder/Facebook
Adrian Fontes.

After thousands of voters across Maricopa County experienced delays and confusion on primary election day, Recorder Adrian Fontes took to Facebook and promised the release of a report explaining the cause for delay.

However the release of that information has been stalled until county attorneys can review the document.

Fontes said this is because “the nature of the information that we put out had a lot of very specific items,” but he is confident the auditors will release a version of the report soon.

He attributed the primary-day delays to the high volume of ballots and voting locations in the state’s most-populous county.

“We are learning about how all these systems work as we are administering,” he said “We've got several decades of a lot of the same stuff and many of the same issues have popped up in elections in the past.”

On election day, Fontes said a contractor failed to provide enough technicians, a statement the company has denied.

To prepare for the November election, Fontes said his office is going to begin testing machines earlier and will strengthen their troubleshooting help line.

“Which frankly were not equipped to handle the volume of calls and that’s why a lot of these other problems arose,” he said.

The Maricopa County Recorder's Office plans to “expand and strengthen” vote centers, which Fontes said worked well and were popular.

He’s also calling for more volunteers.

“We need people who have a little bit of tech savvy to come and give us a few days, we need citizens to help us separate those envelopes and ballots so we can get more accurate and quicker results,” he said.

Over the past 22 months of his administration Fontes said they've seen increases in communication, ballot security and accountability. But he said last Tuesday indicated that there was a lot of work still to do.

“We're very focused on November: on fixing some of these logistical issues and on the ground issues,” he said “We’re going to cooperate with the auditors but that's not our focus.”

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Claire Caulfield was a reporter and Morning Edition producer at KJZZ from 2015 to 2019.