Rep. Ron Barber's legal team today submitted declarations from 15 more voters in Pima County and 9 in Cochise County who swore that they were misdirected by election workers, with their ballots rejected. Together with the 132 declarations submitted on Monday, Barber has now located almost enough apparently-disenfranchised voters to erase GOP challenger Martha McSally's current 161-vote lead.
If you add in 11 additional unnamed Cochise County voters who had their early ballots rejected because they failed to sign the outer envelope and were not given a chance to remedy (as Barber argues they should have), and Barber has located 167 votes he believes should be counted.
As reported earlier by Arizona's Politics, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors today approved the official canvass and rejected the memorandum and declarations submitted by Barber. Pima County did likewise on Monday.
Here is one of the declarations, by a Richard Michael Ross. He describes confusion among the election workers at his polling place, which eventually led to him being instructed to vote a provisional ballot. That ballot was then rejected because he should have been instructed to vote at a neighboring polling place.
"Southern Arizonans who registered to vote and showed up to vote on Election Day deserve to have their voices heard," said Kyle Quinn-Quesada, campaign manager for Ron Barber for Congress. "Mistakes happen in every election, and in a race this close, the right thing to do is to rectify those mistakes by counting every lawful vote."
Once the Arizona Secretary of State certifies the election on December 1, an automatic recount will take place.
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