When the primary election results came in this summer in Pinal County, one current county supervisor, Kevin Cavanaugh, lost his bid for sheriff to another Republican hopeful. But he didn’t believe it.
He blamed his loss on malfeasance and said he only certified the results “under duress.” Then, the Board of Supervisors, all Republicans, commissioned an audit of the election to prove it was fair. It came back completely clean. But the price tag is raising some eyebrows this week: $150,000.
Jen Fifield, senior reporter at Votebeat, is covering it all and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Jen.
JEN FIFIELD: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.
GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So tell us more about Kevin Cavanaugh and why he said he didn't believe the results of the primary to begin with.
FIFIELD: So Kevin Cavanaugh is a Republican supervisor. They're all Republicans in Pinal County and he has expressed some distrust for the County Recorder Dana Lewis in the past and made claims about the county's elections in the past that turned out to be false as well. And this time he was running for sheriff, he lost his, he lost his bid for sheriff 2 to 1.
And after he saw the results he started, he called me and said, “hey, I think something looks fishy here because the early votes are lining up with the Election Day votes. And typically those are, people vote a little bit differently on those. So I think something was up and I think there was fraud.”
GILGER: So how did we get to a point where the Board of Supervisors commissioned this audit?
FIFIELD: Well, basically, I mean, they've been hearing these claims not only in Pinal in Arizona across the country for so long and, and this is their way of combating it, right? They say, you know what you think there's fraud, we will open up our system, we will do an independent audit, hire a law firm to lead it, hire three technical experts to take apart the voting machines. It was Cyber Ninja 2.0 minus the review that took place. They took apart the machines and looked at it. This was Recorder Lewis', the supervisor's, way of saying this was a fair election.
GILGER: OK. So we'll talk more about the results in a minute. But I wonder that because I thought of Cyber Ninjas as well. Like this isn't the first time we've talked about election audits in Arizona elections. Could anyone gen get a county to do this to audit its election results if they didn't believe them?
FIFIELD: I mean, I guess. So it's up to the county supervisors how they want to spend their money on elections. If part of that money is building public trust through conducting audits, conducting additional audits, additional hand counts, then that's their decision. Whether that impacts public opinion, whether this actually changed the mind of anyone is, is really we have no idea.
GILGER: Right. So I want to ask you about that and the results of this audit, do you think this might help quell concerns about elections in Pinal County? Or at least that is, is that what officials there are hoping for?
FIFIELD: That was what they were hoping for. Now, just to be clear, they found nothing in the audit. They took apart the machines, they looked at the security system, they have this brand new election center, they looked at the tabulators that were being used to count ballots, they looked at everything and found absolutely nothing.
But, you know, Pinal County has kind of become this place where it's becoming a little bit more independent. The results are changing a little bit. It's kind of Maricopa County 2.0 in a way where, you know, the results may swing one way or the other, which is kind of, I think stirring up a little bit more of this distrust in people where they're saying, wait, are those really the results that we're seeing here?
GILGER: All right. So I want to ask you also this morning, Jen about another story that you're out with just this morning along with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. I know you looked at mail in ballots that are rejected in our state because of mismatched signatures. How often did you find this happens?
FIFIELD: Well, this is a very, very small percentage of people. You have your signature flagged about 1% of the time if you're a male voter, and then you have it rejected even fewer percent about 1.14% of the time in 2022. And so it's about 800 voters that had this happen to them because their signature did not match what they had on file for them. So we looked at why that was and who this was affecting.
GILGER: OK. So let's talk about who this does affect then and, and I want to be clear we're talking about how election officials are required to compare the signature on your mail-in ballot with the electronic signature that the state kind of has on file for every voter. If they don't match, they will reject the ballot, they're required to. This is a process that's been tightened up here and across the country, Jen, in light of the kind of environment the election denialism that we've seen, right.
FIFIELD: Absolutely. The Kari Lake case here specifically called out the signature verification process and said they were doing it too fast. Trump started the thought on this in 2022, planted the seed on it. And so Stephen Richer in between 2020-2022 tried to make changes to make this a more robust process.
What we found in our analysis is that then the number of signatures rejected tripled from that time. But what we found is it had more probably to do with the amount of voters that actually fixed the problem. Like I said, you flag it, you give voters a chance to fix it and not a lot of voters fix the problem compared to 2020.
GILGER: OK. So we've made this process, more stringent voters do have recourse here but not a lot of them do it. Who is most affected? Like whose signatures are most likely did you find to be rejected?
FIFIELD: So we actually sent a letter to all of these voters in a very unique investigation. We also did a data analysis and we heard back from them that they were a lot of new voters. we saw in the data that a lot of people that registered to vote in 2021 2022 don't have good signatures, good mail written signatures on file. All they have is their driver's license signature. That's very, see, it's an electronic signature and that's kind of the point we wanted to get across is voters need to know if they're a newer voter, they might just have your driver's license signature. That might not be the best one on file. So, watch for that and give them your phone number when you fill out your mail ballot this election.
GILGER: OK. So a lot of younger voters, a lot of new voters. You, you talked to some of them? What did they have to say about this?
FIFIELD: Oh, they were upset. I mean, a lot of them didn't know. And that's the problem. You know, you try to reach out to people, you ask them to put their phone number, but it might just get lost in the mail. It might get lost in a vacation shuffle. And so a lot of them didn't know just to be clear, we didn't hear back from a lot of people and that's part of the problem, right? Mail is not a reliable way to reach voters. And we saw that from our investigation too.
GILGER: You also spoke with a lot of experts here, Jen, which I thought was really interesting about sort of the idea of trying to validate signatures in a quick amount of time or kind of at all in this way, right?
FIFIELD: Right. We talked to forensic signature experts. People that do this for a living have a much different process. They're looking at 10 to dozen signatures, they're looking at the type of document signed to validate a signature. But basically they said with this really sloppy signature on file and a written signature, you can't compare just that, that's not a valid way of doing it.
GILGER: Interesting. OK. So final question for you, Jen here before I let you go. You're talking about two stories here that are about election denialism, right? About this idea that there are lots of questions about how our elections are run and all of the implications, all the fallout from that. We're just a couple of weeks away from election day now in Arizona. What are you watching for?
FIFIELD: I'm watching for all of this. I mean, that's why we're looking at it. We want to know the truth about things like noncitizen voting. We want to know how often this happens. We want to know why people are having ballots rejected. We want to know why results are looking the way they do, if there's different patterns in the results like that supervisor spotted, we want to see them before the election so we can explain to people this is actually quite normal. This is what happens. And this is the kind of thing that we're watching for that would lead to challenges after this election and probably will.
GILGER: Yeah, you're I'm sure anticipating some challenges coming quickly.
FIFIELD: Yes. And it'll, it'll happen fast. We'll all be there throughout the holidays for this.
GILGER: Here we go.
