Illegal Ballot Harvesting a Looming Issue in Arizona

Republican candidate Martha McSally beat Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in last year’s election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat. At least McSally won on election night. We all know what happened: Over the next week hundreds of thousands of early, absentee, and provisional ballots were reviewed, contested, and counted -- and at the end of it all Arizonans found out that Sinema had won.

The same thing happened in several down-ballot races. Of particular concern was the race for secretary of state in which Republican Steve Gaynor, who had promised to focus on election integrity, was ahead by 40,000 votes on election night only to lose by 20,252 votes when the final count was certified.

The pervasiveness of this phenomena raised alarms among Republicans, who wound up on the losing end of all the races that swung from one party to the other between election night and the final certified count that came a week or more later. How could this happen? Was it legitimate or is there a real reason for concern over the integrity of the election? Contributing to the suspicion is not only the lead changes, but the substantial amount of time between Election Day and the certification of the vote. Most people understand intuitively that the more time that elapses the more opportunity there is for cheating.