I want to stress that I am not trying to be alarmist and I am not saying that any wrongdoing has happened, but I want to document what I just saw, because it MAY indicate something wrong happened.
I've been following the issue of uncounted early and provisional ballots for a few days. As part of this, I have been watching the AZ SoS results page very closely. Today, they had three four updates to the count that I know of. I downloaded the available spreadsheets after each update. I did this so that I could compare the counts and see which counties they were coming from.
When I compared the counts between the second and third update, I noticed something very odd. Please follow me below the fold for more.
The oddness comes from Cochise county.
After the first update, Cochise had 37,171 ballots cast.
After the second update, Cochise had 39,995 ballots cast.
After the third update, Cochise had 39,562 ballots cast.
This means that between the second and third update, 433 votes seem to have disappeared.
Now, I am sure that some people may think that I got my second and third spreadsheets confused. That's what I thought, at first. But, now, look at Pima county: 335,716, 335,716 and 351,750 respectively. No change between the first two, and an increase of 16034 ballots between the last two. You can also go to the elections results page and confirm that the current count from Cochise is 39,562, the lower number.
Here is a screenshot showing the count and the timestamp:
I'm not an expert on ballot counting. Maybe votes going down between updates is perfectly normal, but I thought it seemed kind of weird.
I have copies of all of the spreadsheets if anyone would like them. Send me a kosmail and I will email them to you.
PS. While I was writing this, there was a fourth update. There was no change to the Cochise or Pima county numbers from that update, though.
6:22 PM PT: BTW, in the Barber/McSally race the votes from Cochise early ballots at the second and third update here:
Second update
McSally 10,757
Barber 8,152
Third update
McSally 10,514
Barber 7,975
McSally lost 243 votes and Barber lost 177.
I don't think this is any kind of conspiracy against us or them, but 433 votes went somewhere.
6:30 PM PT: PPS. Barber is currently leading by 289 votes.
6:58 PM PT: I just want to reiterate that I am not saying anything wrong happened. I am just sharing what I saw. I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable explanations for why this could happen. On the off chance that something wrong has happened, however, I think people should know about it.