Elections director of Arizona county quits, says she wasn’t protected against political assaults

FLORENCE, Ariz. — The elections director of Arizona’s Pinal County has resigned after lower than a yr within the job, saying county supervisors had tried to politicize elections within the jurisdiction east of Phoenix.

Pinal County confirmed Geraldine Roll’s resignation in a short be aware posted on-line Tuesday, with County Manager Leo Lew thanking Roll for her service “during very challenging times and for the improvements that she identified and began to implement.”

Roll couldn’t be situated Wednesday for remark.

In a letter launched by Pinal County, Roll mentioned she was subjected to “ridicule, disrespect, intimidation and attacks on my reputation and ethics.”

She additional accused Lew of failing to guard her from assaults by Republican county officers.

“It is a far reach to see how you will deliver clean elections when you bend to a faction of the Republican party,” she wrote.

She signed off: “Really, Not Respectfully, Geraldine Roll.”

Roll is a former deputy county lawyer who was appointed elections director late final yr after the county suffered a number of embarrassments, together with a main vote that left some races off ballots and a few precincts ran out of ballots on Election Day. Roll had not but run an election herself.

Pinal County then found proper earlier than the tip of 2022 that it had made errors when counting some ballots, leading to a roughly 500-vote discrepancy between licensed election and recounted tallies. The county has a inhabitants of about 450,000.