TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — The honesty of our elections has come under attack. While a long list of court rulings did not find vote fraud there’s 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.
We’re just a few weeks away from the Presidential Preference election for both the political parties so that means there’s a critical test and it happened at thePima 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. It’s 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 expected—100 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 she’s been watching vote counts for twenty years.
She says she wants to be sure everything’s done right and says Pima County’s 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 State’s team says Arizona’s 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.
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Craig Smith is a reporter for KGUN 9. With more than 40 years of reporting in cities like Tampa, Houston and Austin, Craig has covered more than 40 Space Shuttle launches and covered historic hurricanes like Katrina, Ivan, Andrew and Hugo. Share your story ideas and important issues with Craig by emailing craig.smith@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook and Twitter.
