The honesty of our elections has come under attack. While a long list of court rulings did not find vote fraud theres plenty of pressure on election officials to show their systems are accurate. Near Valencia and Country Club state and local election officials ran a crucial accuracy test.
Were just a few weeks away from the Presidential Preference election for both the political parties so that means theres a critical test and it happened at the Pima County Elections Office where the Secretary of State made sure machines are going to count those votes accurately.
Teams from the Arizona Secretary of State visit every county elections office to oversee a test run of the election systems. Its been a standard test since long before skepticism about elections became common.
Pima County workers are not allowed to know what the ballot count should be. The count that comes back must be exactly what the test crew expected100 percent accuracy. No errors, at all.
Pima Elections Director Constance Hargrove says both political parties can have observers inside and up close to see the ballot count for themselves.
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I think it is important because they get to understand what we do. They get to see from the inside how the process actually works. It demystifies the process really, they’re hands on, they’re in the room, they can hear the conversations and they are involved.
The Republicans did not have a representative in the room for this test but the Democrats did. Democratic observer Barbara Tellman says shes been watching vote counts for twenty years.
She says she wants to be sure everythings done right and says Pima Countys done a good job with that.
KGUN reporter Craig Smith asked: Why is it important for you to send that message out to the voters at large?
Tellman: Because so many people have bad information about the things that are happening with ballots and we want to assure them that everything is done right.
Aaron Thacker, with the Secretary of States team says Arizonas been running safe and fair elections for a long time.
I think it’s more when you hear about the problems, it’s more contrived. People want to plant the seeds of doubt. But when it comes to the elections, we do counts, we do recounts when necessary. It’s a foolproof process.
And there will be retests before the primary election this summer and the Presidential election this fall.