by WorldTribune Staff, December 12, 2024 Real World News
Arizona Republican state Reps. Teresa Martinez and Rachel Jones said on Monday they have called on Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes to investigate Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly's administration of the 2024 general election. Cazares-Kelly is a registered Democrat.
The letter references a county supervisor who had also called for an investigation into Cazares-Kelly, Just the News reported on Sunday.
“Reports indicate that nearly 4,000 voters were impacted,” the state legislators’ letter reads. “It is imperative to fully investigate the Recorder's arbitrary decision to restrict ballot access in this manner and determine the extent to which voters were disenfranchised.”
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The supervisor said that Cazares-Kelly’s office shut down the early ballot request web portal about a week before the early voting deadline in Pima County. The county seat is in Tucson.
The supervisor’s motion during a county Board of Supervisors meeting last month to seek an independent investigation into Cazares-Kelly failed, the report noted.
Martinez and Jones said in their letter that they had written to Cazares-Kelly in June regarding “a reckless voter-registration inmate program” that she “essentially facilitated illegal voting by convicted felons.”
The Republican state representatives demanded that Cazares-Kelly immediately end the inmate program and asked how many individuals were registered to vote through the program since 2020 and if her office had confirmed that those who registered through the program are actually eligible to vote under Arizona law. They said they “received no response.”
The legislators added that they also wrote Cazares-Kelly in October “to express our constituents' concerns over the Recorder's Office's processing, storage, and communications relating to undeliverable and returned ballots.”
The October letter noted: “It appears that in some cases when a ballot is returned as undeliverable, voters have received a notification stating, ‘We received your mailed ballot’ and ‘We are in the process of verifying your signature.’ This notification understandably causes confusion since an unvoted ballot that has not reached its intended recipient should not bear any signature on the affidavit appearing on the outside envelope.”
Mayes’ office told Just the News on Thursday in response to a request for comment, “The attorney general’s office has received the request from the representatives. However, I’ll have to decline to comment further. The attorney general’s office does not comment on potential investigations.”
