A federal judge has ordered Maricopa County to redo the election for two Phoenix Union High School District Governing Board seats after the county printed incorrect directions on some ballots.
A federal consent decree requires Phoenix Union voters to cast only one vote in the race for two open governing board seats. The decree was the result of a 1990 lawsuit that argued the previous election process in the district diluted minority votes.
In October, Maricopa County officials notified the court they erroneously printed ballots directing Phoenix Union voters to select up to two candidates, which would violate the decree.
“By the time Maricopa County became aware of the mistake, voters on the Active Early Voting List had already received their ballots and commenced voting,” according to court documents.
Maricopa County asked a federal court for guidance on how to remedy the situation.
Judge G. Murray Snow initially allowed the election to move forward but enjoined the canvass of the election, essentially blocking election officials from certifying those votes.
Francisco Pastor-Rivera and Aaron Marquez won that election, but Snow issued an order on Dec. 12 ordering the county to rerun the race in a special, mail-in election on March 11.
According to the order, the majority of voters who cast ballots in the race complied with the consent decree, but “at least 44,605 voters selected two candidates on their ballots, and thus cast ballots in violation of the Decree.”
That could have affected the results of the election, because Marquez defeated third-place finisher Debbie Cross by less than 2,000 votes, Snow found.
“The mistake simply makes it impossible to declare, with any confidence, who the winners of a legally conducted election would be or that the mistake was not consequential,” he wrote.
The judge acknowledged that moving the election from a presidential year to a special election in 2025 will likely decrease voter participation but found the terms of the consent decree required the election to be rerun.
“As the results of the recent general election demonstrate, however, more voters in a fatally flawed election, at least in this instance, do not help determine who would have won the election had it been lawfully conducted,” Snow wrote.
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