2nd Arizona county mulling hand-counts rejects effort

PHOENIX (AP) — The elected leaders of an Arizona county who had considered following the lead of a rural county by expanding their hand-counts of ballots from next week’s election rejected the effort Wednesday.

The majority on the Pinal County board of supervisors said they saw no reason to doubt the current hand-count audits that verify machine tabulation results or expand them to include more precincts as one supervisor proposed.

That leaves rural Cochise County alone in the state in pursuing a full hand-tally of all their ballots, a move that is being challenged in court as illegal.

During Wednesday's meeting of the all-Republican Pinal County board, Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh proposed doubling or tripling the number of precincts chosen for the post-election hand-count audit.

He pointed to the repeated and unfounded claims by former President Donald Trump about ballot tabulation machines that have fired up his supporters and also said that Hillary Clinton has made similar statements. The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee criticized that year’s election but conceded to Trump, publicly acknowledged his victory and attended his inauguration.

“But as the concerns have been brought to me, the question is, is the machine reliable?” Cavanaugh said. “Are the count of the ballots that come out of machine reliable?”

He asked the board to approve the expansion, to ensure the hand-count sample is large enough to get what he said would be a statistically reliable number of ballots.

The proposal found little support from the other four Republicans on the board, although they took public comment on the issue for more than an hour. Those comments were overwhelmingly against the proposal, even from a local county GOP party leader.

Kathy Nowak, who sits on the executive...