President Donald Trump on Monday criticized election officials over a Maricopa County ballots error after about 3,000 early ballots were mailed out ahead of schedule in Arizona’s largest county.
The county recorder’s office said the misstep, attributed to a vendor, will not affect the voters who received the ballots. Maricopa County has about 2.5 million registered voters.
Responding to a reporter’s question, Trump said the county, home to Phoenix and the most populous in the battleground state, should “be ashamed of themselves,” and called Maricopa “a very, very dishonest county.”
The remarks came as the president has been intensifying his rhetoric around voting as Election Day approaches in the midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.
Maricopa County ballots error tied to vendor
The county recorder’s office, led by Republican Recorder Justin Heap, said Sunday that Runbeck Election Services notified officials it had “mistakenly mailed 3,126 early ballots the previous day,” six days before the scheduled mailing for this year’s midterms.
Runbeck said the ballots were handled separately from the primary mailing because they did not qualify for automated U.S. Postal Service processing. The pallet with those ballots was included with mail released that evening, which sent them to the Postal Service six days early, the company said.
According to the recorder’s office, the ballots went to the correct voters, remain valid, and can be completed and returned as normal.
Judy Keane, a spokesperson for the recorder’s office, did not respond directly to Trump’s comments and pointed to statements from the office and Runbeck.
Jeff Ellington, president and CEO of Runbeck Election Services, said Monday that Maricopa County was not at fault. “It was pure accident, just a human error,” he said, adding the mistake was not intentional.
County remains a flashpoint in election debates
Maricopa County, pivotal in statewide races, has been a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. Trump has often focused unfounded claims about the 2020 election on the county.
Recorder Heap and the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors spent months in a legal dispute over how to jointly run elections. They reached a settlement in July.
