Attorney General Mark Brnovich hired a special investigator Thursday to determine if Secretary of State Michele Reagan broke any laws in the recent special election. Michael Morrissey, a former federal prosecutor, will review the failure of Reagan’s office to ensure pamphlets describing the issues on the May 17 ballot were delivered to the homes of all registered voters before the early ballots went out. That should have happened by April 20. Reagan does not dispute that at least 200,000 of the 1.9 million pamphlets were not mailed on time. And each of those was to go to a home with more than one registered voter, meaning at least 400,000 people may not have had the descriptions of the two measures before they mailed back their early ballots. She said, though, the blame lies with others, including a contractor and a consultant. But Ryan Anderson, spokesman for Brnovich, said the scope of the foul-up was actually larger than Reagan let on.
He pointed out that Reagan was responsible for preparing the mailing list for the brochures solely for the 13 rural counties, as Maricopa and Pima counties had prepared their own. Anderson said that left only about 533,000 brochures to mail; she got out about 328,000 on time.
“You don’t get to take credit for the list you didn’t prepare,” he said.
In his appointment of Morrissey, Brnovich wants to know exactly what went wrong and why. And the attorney general wants Morrissey to determine whether any criminal or civil laws were broken.
Full Article: Arizona AG hires independent investigator to probe election problems | Elections | tucson.com.