ABC15 Abe Hamadeh Garrett Archer Hal Kunnen Jen Fifield News Votebeat

Media Dismisses Claims of Thousands of Arizona Voters Claiming Disenfranchisement – Arizona Daily Independent

June 8, 2025

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Thousands of voters maintain they were disenfranchised in the 2022 election — legacy media say they shouldn’t have counted.

ABC 15’s election reporter and a former top official within the secretary of state’s office, Garrett Archer, said the over 9,000 uncounted ballots were from “potential noncitizens.” Somewhere over 1,000 (or more) of those 9,000 provisional ballots were votes cast by Arizonans who have consistently cast regular ballots in past statewide elections.

From 2016 to 2019, Archer was the senior elections analyst for then-secretaries of state Michele Reagan and, briefly, Katie Hobbs (now governor).

As evidence, Archer shared a 2023 X.com post from Votebeat reporter Jen Fifield claiming the viral disenfranchisement of a disabled veteran in 2022 (anonymized as “Howard”) was due to nothing more than voter confusion.

I checked into this. He enrolled in another county, so he was automatically unenrolled in Maricopa County. pic.twitter.com/bUetXLBjX2

— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) March 17, 2023

Howard maintains he never enrolled in another county. His is an account that aligns with hundreds of others who filed sworn declarations of their disenfranchisement due to a Hobbs-established system altering voter registrations without voter knowledge or consent.

As reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, the state of Arizona filled out and submitted a voter registration form without Howard’s knowledge or consent. The state did so after Howard requested a State Identification Card at an Arizona Department of Transportation office, since his medical issues no longer allowed him to possess a driver’s license. This was not an enrollment to vote. Howard never received notice from any state or county entity to advise him of this involuntary registration.

This method of automatic voter registration was approved in 2020 by Hobbs as secretary of state.

There’s also the husband of State Senator Wendy Rogers, military veteran Hal Kunnen. Per the lawmaker, her husband was “one of the 9,000” never counted.

My military veteran husband’s ballot for Abe Hamadeh was one of the 9,000 that never got counted. https://t.co/DwFOJfmXOE

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) November 29, 2024

Howard and Kunnen were just a select few of potentially over 9,000 voters whose votes were never counted after they were required to vote provisionally. Thousands would be enough to change the outcome of any race. The 2022 attorney general race was decided by less than 300 votes.

Over 1,000 voters submitted signed declarations of their disenfranchisement. The Arizona Daily Independent reviewed over a dozen of these signed declarations. Like Howard, these voters say they were forced into an uncounted provisional ballot because their voter registrations were altered or canceled without their knowledge or consent. These voters declared they voted from their primary residence for years before suddenly discovering the issue in their voter registration in 2022.

One declaration described a provisional voter who maintained the same voter registration address for 50 years only to find their registration cancelled in the 2022 election. This voter swore to voting in the general and primary elections in the election years immediately preceding the 2022 general election: 2018, 2020, and early 2022.

Another declaration described a provisional voter who had resided and voted in Maricopa County for over 40 years, only to have their registration changed in the 2022 general election.

In addition to the uncounted 9,000 provisional votes, there was also the potential issue within the over 75,000 ballots statewide tallied as “undervotes” — ballots reported as having no candidate selected for the attorney general race. Pinal County had a record of incorrectly tabulating ballots as undervotes (evidence withheld from the court by then-secretary of state Katie Hobbs), and a visual inspection of a sample of Maricopa County ballots found ballots incorrectly tabulated as undervotes.

These discoveries raised concern over how many of the remaining 75,000 ballots were also incorrectly tabulated as undervotes. The misread rate in Maricopa County alone yielded a potential number of misread ballots greater than Democratic candidate Kris Mayes’ declared margin of victory following the recount.

Even with these uncertainties remaining around the election, court delays ultimately prompted the Arizona Supreme Court to opt out of taking up the case last November. With that decision, Arizona’s 15 counties destroyed the ballots, uncounted and all — meaning there is no way to prove who out of the 9,000 were disenfranchised.