Richard Ruelas

The Republic | azcentral.com

In her office, Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell was giving another in a series of media interviews about the mistakes her office made in the March 2016 presidential preference election, mistakes that stranded voters in line at polling places for five hours or more.

Purcell spoke in her typically measured and calm tone as she took blame for the lines. But as she talked about listening to citizens accuse her of intentionally creating the Election Day chaos, she started to cry.

“Give me a minute,” she said softly.

A woman at the just-completed Board of Supervisors meeting, in which the body officially accepted the election results, had accused Purcell of betraying the public trust.

"It’s blatantly right here in front of us,” Franchesca Garza said during her two minutes of allotted time to speak to the board. “You can see the corruption. You can see who got paid.”

The previous day, during a state legislative hearing, another woman pointed at Purcell and called her a "snake in the grass."

Though Purcell, 80, has held her job as county recorder since 1988, she has been shielded from the barbs other politicians routinely receive. She wasn’t used to accusations of being on the take, of being for sale.

“ 'Who got paid?' ” she said, echoing the comment. “That just makes me so mad.” Here, her voice choked. “I’d never do anything to like that ever,” she said, in a whisper, as the tears flowed.

Purcell had been pilloried in the press and by the public for the election mess. In the coming weeks, she would face a federal inquiry and a lawsuit and more questions about why her office reduced the number of polling places from 200 in the last presidential election cycle to 60 in this one.

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And she had to plan for a statewide election, with its ballot mailings, polling-place logistics and machine certification, that was weeks away.

“We can’t change what happened,” she said. “But as I’ve mentioned before, we’ve got an election on May 17. We have to be ready for that.”

'It still makes sense on paper. It just didn't happen that way'

On the day of the presidential preference election, Purcell gave live interviews to morning news shows as the polls opened at the Church of the Beatitudes, one of the 60 polling places open that day. It was the typical Election Day segment, as Purcell explained how to vote and how long the polling places would be open.

This election brought a twist to explain. For the first time, voters could go to any polling place they desired, rather than an assigned location close to their home. New equipment meant poll workers at each of the 60 voting centers, each a larger space than a typical polling site, could consult an electronic list of the entire voter roster. And those high-tech poll books could communicate with each other, letting workers at all locations know when a voter had cast a ballot.

As Purcell left the church that morning, there was a steadily growing line. But she didn’t see it as anything dire. She saw it as early-risers hitting the polls. Democracy in action.

Purcell had been in Fountain Hills three days earlier, when a rally headlined by billionaire and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump drew thousands of supporters and lines of protesters, some of whom blocked the two main roads leading into the town. Despite the crowd, Purcell still felt confident in her Election Day plan, which was built to accommodate a voter turnout of 29 percent.

Lines grew throughout the day and by the time the polls closed at 7 p.m., hundreds of people had yet to vote. At midnight, people were still waiting at five polling places. The final vote in Maricopa County was cast, records show, at 12:46 a.m. on Wednesday, the day after Election Day.

For Purcell, it was a failure of a novel system. But she still felt that system, as designed, should have worked.

“It still makes sense on paper,” she said, in an interview the week after the election. “It just didn’t happen that way.”

She said she didn’t count on the approximately 18,000 ineligible voters who decided to show up at the polls despite not being registered as either a Republican, Democratic or Green party member. Those voters could vote a provisional ballot, which would count if elections staff could later verify they were registered. But explaining that, and convincing voters it was not part of a conspiracy to disenfranchise them, would take five or 10 minutes per person.

There were also 11,500 or so voters who had been sent an early ballot, but showed up at the polls to vote in person anyway. Poll workers needed to check the voter's name against a database to ensure their early ballot had not been counted before letting them vote. Other voters, anecdotally, stood in line with their completed early ballot even though they didn't have to. They could have simply dropped off their ballot.

All that was going through Purcell’s mind when she gave an interview just before 9 p.m. on Election Day to KSAZ-TV, Phoenix’s Fox affiliate. The reporter, Jessica Flores, asked who was to blame for the long lines.

“Well, the voters," Purcell said, "for getting in line.”

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There is no perfect election

Amidst the turmoil surrounding the March election, a group of people hired Purcell and her office to conduct their elections: the state’s Republicans. The party asked Purcell's office to conduct the elections for delegates to the state convention at each of its districts in Maricopa County. She would also handle delegate elections at the state convention.

The party had tried to do elections on its own in previous years and realized what a task it was, said Avinash Iragavarapu, executive director of the Arizona Republican Party.

“Without her, we wouldn’t have been able to do this,” he said before voting would get underway. “We get the results a lot sooner.”

On the evening of April 6, voting took place for Legislative District 28, Purcell’s home district. It was filled with Purcell’s friends and neighbors, and as she walked among the crowd that night, she would receive words of encouragement.

“What a buzz saw to have to go walk into this late into your career,” said Dan Hesselbrock as he hugged Purcell.

John Atkins approached her with this advice: “Don’t pay attention to the idiots.”

Scott O’Connor, the son of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, told Purcell: “You were caught in the perfect storm.”

O’Connor said he was taken aback at the tone of reaction to the election. “I just cringed,” O’Connor said. The anger, he said, was coming from “people that don’t know what a sharp operation she has.”

Purcell was born in Kansas, the daughter of a hog buyer. She grew up in small cities around the Midwest and Southwest. A job with a mortgage company brought her to Phoenix.

Purcell didn’t like the way the Recorder’s Office was run. It wasn’t efficient or cooperative with those in the real-estate business. So, in February 1988, at age 52, she decided to run for the office.

Once elected, she modernized the recording process, making documents available digitally. She introduced kiosks that allowed someone to record a document without having to trek to an office. It was a first in the country.

Purcell also worked on modernizing the elections process. She got rid of the mechanical lever-style booth and replaced it with optical scanners. She was an early adopter nationwide of early voting and mail-in ballots.

Her work is appreciated by real-estate officials and politicians. Purcell has a slew of awards from organizations with bureaucratic-sounding names.

But the public doesn’t typically notice her job until something goes wrong. And, typically in an election cycle, with so many details, something invariably does.

“If you say you’ve conducted the perfect election,” she said, “you haven’t conducted an election.”

In previous years, Purcell’s office has left a candidate’s name off a ballot and printed the wrong election date on Spanish-language materials, errors that could be fixed through reprints and new mailings. The long lines on Election Day could not be fixed. And, it was feared, the lines may have kept untold numbers of people from casting ballots.

As the legislative district meeting opened, Purcell sat in a chair at the back of the room and filled out her own ballot, using a black pen.

Kathy Petsas, the chair of the meeting, started introducing dignitaries. And it appeared the neighborhood was chock-full of them. State Rep. Kathy Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, Phoenix Councilman Bill Gates, former state Attorney General Tom Horne.

Petsas saved Purcell’s introduction for last. “She is the one secret to making things run very well for our district,” Petsas said. “We greatly appreciate her and her staff.”

Petsas called for a round of applause and Purcell rose from her chair.

The woman who last week had been pilloried at meetings was at one where she was cheered.

On this evening, the voting would last about 30 minutes. There were no lines.

'We have to do something'

On an afternoon in April, Purcell stood in front of a map of the 116 polling places for the May election.

The Elections Office attempted to add the new polling places strategically. A map in Purcell’s office showed the eight polling places that closed the latest in the March election. Staff worked to put more polling places in those areas.

But finding those was a challenge. They needed to be able to reserve the room from, at minimum, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the day polls were open. The space needed to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act and needed to have adequate parking.

Elections staff members also had to make nice with some of the 60 polling places used in March. Staffers scrubbed grime off one church hall. Another church received new carpet courtesy of the county Elections Department. Another was told to send the bill for plumbing damage.

None of this would be cheap. The additional polling places would cost at least $78,000 more to staff. Not to mention the $100 or so rental fee for each one.

Another hitch and expense: The deadline for the Secretary of State’s publicity pamphlet about the election had long passed. The list of new polling places would have to be sent out to voters in a separate mailing.

But even as the new map was being put together, Purcell and her staff still believed that the old plan of 60 polling places was adequate.

“I still say our map should have worked,” said Kristi Passarelli, the assistant elections director, while looking at the new map. “It should have and it just didn’t.”

Purcell and Passarelli admitted that while doing the work to double the number of polling places, they had to put out of their minds all the reasons why they thought it wasn’t necessary.

Unlike in the March preference election, all registered voters would be eligible to vote, meaning fewer time-consuming provisional ballots.

The questions on the ballot — the education spending package, Proposition 123, and the pension-reform package, Proposition 124 — were unlikely to inspire the fervor of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

And more people would vote by mail. The long lines in March might have served to dent the romanticism some voters still had about casting a ballot in person.

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Purcell and Passarelli figured that on May 17, most of these new voting sites, which had been carefully culled, inspected and funded, would sit largely vacant.

But they needed to show they were acting to prevent another day of long lines.

“Yup,” Purcell said, “we have to do something.”

And then, another glitch

On April 21, Purcell gathered her elections officials in a room to discuss preparations for the upcoming election. The listing of tasks showed the logistics involved in an election.

One woman discussed hiring poll workers; one man described the preventative maintenance done on voting machines; another discussed renting trucks to bring in ballots, and mapping out the best routes to drive them to the elections building in lower downtown Phoenix. Another talked about ensuring there was enough money in the county postal account to pay postage on returned ballots.

Those ballots had been mailed out that week. And, despite all the discussions of details, one had eluded everybody on Purcell’s staff. It would be discovered the day after this meeting.

The Spanish-language description of Proposition 124 repeated the description for Proposition 123. It stated the measure was about public education and not pensions.

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On the afternoon the news broke, Purcell and Karen Osborne, the county's elections director, were scheduled to be at the State Bar of Arizona for a meeting with election lawyers, who were at a day-long seminar preparing for the upcoming cycle.

They were also putting a plan in place to fix the ballot error. “We’re going to send out a card that shows the error,” Purcell said, “and we’re going to reprint all the ballots going to the polling place.” The reprinting and mailing would cost an estimated $400,000.

Before their scheduled seminar, Purcell and Osborne wanted to meet with Roopali Desai, an attorney who has worked with the firefighters union, one of the groups behind the pension-reform effort. Desai was attending the seminar, and Osborne summoned her out of her session and to the lobby for a meeting.

Asked what she thought when she found out about the error, Purcell smiled. “What do you think?” she said. “I wish it didn’t happen. I still have a fine team. We made an error, and we’re going to do everything we can to fix it.”

At that point, Desai walked into the lobby. Purcell turned to meet with her and Osborne, no longer wishing to discuss the problem, but instead wanting to work to fix it.

Numbers tell a story

That same Friday, April 22, Purcell sent back a response, as required, to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The department had opened an inquiry and asked for documents and answers to specific questions about the March election.

Federal officials had asked the reason for the reduced numbers of polling places for this election. Purcell’s office provided the formula it used to arrive at that number.

The county estimated, using the historic turnout for the 2008 preference election, that 71,300 voters would actually show up at the polls, rather than mail in a ballot.

The county then tried to figure out the smallest number of polling places that could handle that number. If there were 60 polling places, each site would handle 1,188 voters, which seemed reasonable.

The actual Election Day turnout of 83,489 exceeded predictions, but wasn't unexpected. The county prepared for 90,000 voters, with each polling place, according to the letter, ready to handle 1,500 voters.

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The hitch occurred not in the total numbers, but at individual polling sites. The county’s statistics from Election Day show that two-thirds of the polling places county-wide drew more than the target of 1,500 voters. Polling places in the metro Phoenix region were particularly crowded. More than half of those drew more than 2,000 voters.

The plan worked on paper, but failed in the real world because voters did not evenly distribute themselves across the county, including to the rural areas of Wittmann and Waddell.

The Justice Department inquiry wasn’t concerned with an election simply run badly. It was concerned about an election run in a way that affected a group’s civil rights. The county, in its response, argued that it had not.

“ ... almost every polling place throughout Maricopa County had equally long lines, no matter the location,” the letter said. “Polling places in Gilbert and Paradise Valley had equally long lines as polling places in South Phoenix.”

Map: Areas hardest hit by slim polling options

Purcell and her staff, in interviews during the weeks after the election, kept insisting the plan should have worked.

But, in an interview at the elections office in late April, Purcell seemed to have realized the flaw in the plan.

“We said 60 polling places. We should have known not all 60 would have been equally used,” she said. “Should we have located more of them in the metro area of the Valley?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

'How do you sleep at night?'

A Tucson man, John Brakey, who called himself an “election integrity activist” sued Purcell along with other county officials and the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, arguing that the election was fraudulent and should never have been certified.

Purcell sat in the front row of the gallery during two days of testimony.

Brakey, in a later interview, described a conspiracy in which elections officials work to manipulate voting outcomes. Brakey said this was done for the benefit of “the status quo,” but said he hadn’t looked at the motivations behind it. “I don’t know who is pulling the strings,” he said.

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Four voters described their stories of trying to vote in the March election.

One man talked about a five-hour wait at a church. Two said they thought they had changed their party registration, but records showed they had not. And a woman who moved but didn't update her registration said she waited a half hour at the elections office while workers updated her registration and gave her a ballot.

To Purcell, the stories were the types her office deals with on a day-to-day basis.

“We hear this quite often,” Purcell said after court was over.

The judge dismissed the lawsuit shortly after testimony was concluded. He noted, in the written ruling he issued later, that the anecdotes told in court were not evidence of systematic election fraud.

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After the ruling, Purcell waited in a side room with Osborne and an attorney, waiting for the hallway to clear. But she didn’t wait long enough.

One woman, upset both at the dismissal of the lawsuit and at having to wait five hours to vote in March, was using the intervening time to pose for photos outside the courtroom, photos she would later post on social media. In one, she raised her middle finger in defiance.

When Purcell walked out, the woman, Dai Lili Dawson, approached her. "How do you sleep at night?" she asked her, according to a video of the encounter. Purcell showed no reaction. "I don't think that's any of your business," she told her. Purcell's staff gathered around and started walking with her toward the elevator.

Dawson, who had called Purcell a "snake in the grass" at the legislative hearing weeks earlier, told Purcell and her staff, "I hope you all slither back into your holes."

Purcell was taken aback. But was not moved to tears.

'You've got to be above that'

Purcell attended the Arizona Republican Convention, but not to mingle or tussle over whether to support Sen. Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. She was there to run an election.

After running the district elections that chose delegates to this state convention, her office would now conduct elections to pick delegates to the national convention.

Purcell sat in a conference room with her staff to wait out the morning session. She anticipated delegates would be arguing over the voting rules, but she didn’t want to listen in on those floor discussions.

In her political life, Purcell has not endorsed candidates. The only public position she took on an issue was in 1996 when county voters considered whether to keep her job an elected position, or one appointed by county leaders. She wanted it to stay elected.

Purcell says she tries to follow the spirit of her grandfather, Ernie Quigley, who called college basketball and football games and umpired thousands of Major League Baseball games.

“You’ve got to be fair and even,” she said. “You’ve got to be above that.”

Once voting began, Purcell tried to hop into each of the rooms were ballots were being cast. She moved quickly through the crowds, even though sometimes she was headed against the flow. Her Fitbit fitness tracker, affixed to her wrist with a red, white and blue strap, would indicate she took more than 9,000 steps on this day, the rough equivalent of four miles.

As the voting wound down, a man in a dark suit approached Purcell. He was Aaron Flannery, who had announced he was running as a Republican in the primary against Purcell for the job of recorder.

They greeted each other. And he suggested they meet sometime soon. “All right,” Purcell said, though, after he left she admitted she wasn’t sure what there was to meet about.

Outside, securing his campaign sign against approaching winds, Flannery said he wanted to offer to Purcell his advice for running the August primary election and November general election. “What she’s planning,” he said, “and if she needs my assistance.”

Flannery, a U.S. Army veteran seeking his first elected office, said he met with Purcell after announcing his candidacy and found her “the sweetest lady that you’ll ever meet.”

“I was actually hoping she would be a little bit snide to make me feel better,” he said.

In previous elections, according to Purcell's campaign disclosure forms, she has not posted signs, created mailers or done anything beyond gathering the required signatures to get her name on the ballot.

This time, though, besides her primary opponent, she has, for the first time since her initial 1988 election, a Democratic opponent in the general election. Adrian Fontes announced his candidacy the day after the March election.

On this day, she had brought her nominating petitions with her, thinking she might collect signatures. But she left them in the conference room. “I figure it was confusing enough out there,” she said.

After all the votes were cast, the ballot machines were wheeled back into the conference room. The head of the state GOP, Robert Graham, entered to get the results.

He told Purcell that an observer from one of the national campaigns praised the voting process, saying it was the best he’d seen in the country. “Awesome, awesome, awesome,” Graham said to Purcell and her staff before walking out of the room.

Purcell's office handled the elections for delegates from the state's nine Congressional districts. There would be another election later in the day for delegates at large, where attendees could choose among a slew of candidates, or pick a slate devoted to a particular candidate.

Purcell's machines could not handle all those names and choices. So the state GOP would run those elections on its own, using an online system. Those elections would be marred by glitches and confusion.

But while that was going on, Purcell was eating Mexican food with her staff and enjoying a margarita.

A final test, and then another election

Purcell was tired the day of the logic and accuracy test, a statutorily required run-through of the voting machines that took place on May 7. The day before, Purcell's flight to Phoenix had been delayed four hours.

"I've got a little black cloud over my head," she said, while standing in the counting room of the elections headquarters.

Purcell had been at a meeting of the board of directors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal group that provides assistance to elections officials nationwide. Her cohorts nationwide had read the stories of the March election and offered support.

Purcell said elections officials all have similar stories of varying degrees "if you've run elections for any length of time."

For the test, representatives from the Secretary of State's Office prepared ballots and ran them through the machines. So had officials from Purcell's office. Party officials verified that the counts were what they were supposed to be and signed a certification saying so.

There was some exaggerated expressions of congratulations that the machines worked. Then everyone filed out.

To Purcell, this test, as low key and routine as it was, served as a counter to the accusations of corruption she had heard the past two months.

"It's important that people know that we care that much about processing their ballots to make sure the equipment is in good shape and tests out perfectly," she said.

Purcell said again that she would never want to keep someone from voting. "It's upsetting to me that I did something that people think I was trying to suppress the vote," Purcell said. "That was not my intention. I thought we had something that was a good idea, that was new and different."

Before she walked out of the counting room, she was asked for a prediction about the May election.

"I think it's going to go well," she said.