UPDATED: City Council elections not included on some ballots

Jul 8, 2022

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Ballot_in_the_box — Mail-in ballots distributed throughout Pinal County are lacking the City and Town Council elections for many municipalities.

Editor’s note: This is a breaking story. This post will be updated as more information becomes available.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect additional areas affected and an approximation of the ballots affected.

If you wanted to vote by mail in this year’s Maricopa City Council election, you might have a problem.

According to emails and social media circulating around the county, the city council elections, for Maricopa and many other municipalities in the county, were left off the ballots recently mailed to citizens.

All total, about 63,000 ballots were affected.

Through Pinal County social media channels, the following notice was issued Thursday night:

“The County has been made aware of issues with some early ballots not reflecting the correct city and town election races. County Election and Recorder staff are working hard to identify the scale of the issue.”

The issue came to light on Thursday night, when it appeared the problem only affected Apache Junction and Superior. This morning, however, ballots in Maricopa and Casa Grande were also found to be missing portions concerning town elections. Later reports showed that the problems extended to Eloy, Queen Creek and Mammoth.

The primary for the City Council election is Aug. 2. There are four candidates, Adam Leach, Vincent Manfredi, Rich Vitiello and Henry Wade.

Manfredi is currently the city’s interim mayor. Vitiello and Wade are council members. Leach is a Maricopa Realtor.

In an email, James Daniels, Pinal County’s director of communications, said that efforts are ongoing to rectify the issue.

“Working with the Secretary of State’s Office and our County Attorney’s Office, we are currently looking at a solution for voters in impacted areas to be sent a supplemental ballot specifically for their city/town contest,” he said.

Affected voters will receive a supplementary ballot-by-mail with the correct municipal contests. Voters should still utilize the initial ballot for Federal, State, and Legislative contests. Any votes in municipal contests in the cities and towns listed above will not be registered on the original ballot, only on the supplementary ballot, which will be sent to all eligible voters.

People can also bring defective ballots to the county building at 19955 N. Wilson Ave. Maricopa, AZ 85139 and get a new ballot and use it to vote early, in person.

Editor’s note: Vincent Manfredi is co-owner of InMaricopa.