Maricopa County: Most of the misplaced ballots discovered after Nov. 4 election have been counted

Maricopa County election officials said they were able to count a vast majority of the over 2,000 misplaced ballots that were discovered days after the Nov. 4 elections.

Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett told the Board of Supervisors that election workers at a Glendale voting location placed two sealed boxes of ballots into a wheeled drop box to make it easier to move to a transport truck.

However, no one removed them from that drop box when it was returned to the county’s central elections center, and they were not discovered until the Friday after the election during a later round of routine checks.

Jarrett said the ballots were discovered in their sealed boxes.

“We were able to go to the security report that the poll workers filled out on election night that listed the tamper evidence seals that were on each one of those five transport bins, and they matched the transport bins that were in the warehouse,” he said.

Of the 2,288 ballots found, 30 needed to be sent to curing, according to the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. That means election workers needed to contact the voter to verify their signature.

The Recorder’s Office was operating on a tougher than normal deadline with those ballots, which were discovered Friday. State law required election officials to finish the curing process by the end of that day.

“So we text, we called — and we made it an effort to call, sounds redundant, every three hours,” said Rey Valenzuela, the Recorder's Office director of early voting.

Valenzuela said 16 ballots from the batch were not counted due to signature issues. Five ballots included no signature at all, and another 11 were not cured, because the Recorder’s Office was unable to reach the voters in question.