Pima County residents will see changes in voting system for CD7 special election

Pima County voters will see several changes in the upcoming congressional election to fill the seat of the late Raúl Grijalva, who died in March after a battle with lung cancer.

Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly is rolling out new vote-by-mail envelopes and, for the first time, the county will offer a pair of 24-hour ballot drop boxes for the July 15 primary election in Congressional District 7.

Pima County residents can now also sign in their own account on the Recorder’s Office website’s voter dashboard and view their voter records, including the status of their early ballot.

Once they have signed in, voters will be able to request and track an early ballot, verify their voter registration, see what jurisdictions they live in, view their voter history and sign up for various alerts.

Last year, the Recorder’s Office became overwhelmed by the number of early ballot requests and had to send emails to nearly 4,000 voters to let them know their request for an early ballot had been discarded.

People who regularly vote by mail will notice that they will no longer have to place their ballot inside a signed white envelope and then mail that envelope inside a second yellow envelope.

Instead, they will mail their ballot back in the same envelope that bears their signature, which is checked against county records by election officials to verify their identity.

The change is expected to speed up election results by saving a considerable amount of work by county election officials, who now must take each ballot out of the yellow envelope it was mailed in before they can review the signature on the white envelope and then pass the ballot along to the tabulation team.

That’s one of the steps that slows down post-election ballot tabulation after voters drop their vote-by-mail ballots off at polling places on Election Day.

Overall, the Recorder’s Office processed more than 444,000 early ballots in the 2024 presidential election. While some of those ballots were drop-offs at satellite offices where voters were instructed to take them out of the yellow envelope envelopes before turning them over, the majority had to be removed from the mailing envelope.

More than 61,000 of those mailed ballots were processed after Election Day, from Nov. 6 to Nov. 15.

The single-envelope system is already used in Maricopa, Apache, Graham, Mohave and Yavapai counties, according to Recorder’s Office spokesperson Mike Truelsen.

The previous two-envelope method did ensure that no one was able to see a voter’s signature while it was moving through the mail. Now that signature will be visible, but Truelsen said Cázares-Kelly concluded that the ballot cannot be seen inside the envelope and that her staffers would not be opening the envelopes as they reviewed the signatures.

“Recorder Cázares-Kelly is confident that ballots returned to the United States Postal Service, another government agency, will be treated with the utmost respect and professionalism,” Truelsen said in a statement. “Voters’ choices are not visible through the envelope and privacy is still maintained.”

Truelsen pointed out that voters who are not comfortable with sending the envelope through the mail have the option of dropping them off at multiple early-voting locations as well as the new 24-hour drop boxes, which will be monitored by video cameras around the clock. The boxes include a waterless fire-suppression system and other anti-theft features.

Those drop boxes, which have been used in Maricopa County for years, are secured boxes similar to mailboxes. For the CD7 election, drop boxes will be located outside the Recorder’s Downtown branch at 240 N. Stone Ave. and at the East Side location, 6920 E. Broadway.

Cázares-Kelly office plans to increase the number of drop boxes in future elections.