APACHE COUNTY, Ariz. — As Arizona readies itself for a contentious midterm election, voters in remote, windswept Apache County are hoping this time will be different.

The mammoth county is known for pine-topped mountains and rolling high desert hills. It’s also home to a large swath of the country’s largest Native American reservation—the Navajo Nation, which makes up its northern half.

Voters there have been let down many times before. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the Nation filed emergency lawsuits against Apache County to extend polling hours—a result of voting sites opening late, per court records.

Then, in 2024, the county experienced an election meltdown on an entirely different scale.

It started less than half an hour after polls opened. Rita Vaughan, then the county’s elections director, wrote what would prove to be a consequential email to her team at 6:27 a.m.: “All printers are not working with poll books.”

Within hours, the voting process had slowed to a crawl—and, in some cases, appeared to halt entirely. There were reports of two- to three-hour lines at some polling places.

In public statements and, later, in court, the county blamed malfunctioning ballot printers for the fiasco. They maintained that voters could still vote via backup options like emergency, preprinted ballots and accessible voting machines. They said that staff fixed the problems expeditiously and voting never paused across the reservation. 

There’s just one problem with their explanation: It’s not what actually happened.

The issue that day stemmed from the county’s electronic pollbooks, not its printers—and it caused a complete breakdown, according to an investigation by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and Votebeat. Records show a combination of technical glitches, communication shortfalls, understaffing and poor preparation disenfranchised voters in Apache County.

To reconstruct what happened, AZCIR and Votebeat examined thousands of pages of court documents, voting records and county emails—some of which the county took 16 months to hand over. Reporters also interviewed voters and witnesses and repeatedly attempted to interview multiple county officials, all of whom either didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined to talk on the record.

The investigation found that the cash-strapped, rural county appeared fundamentally unprepared for the 2024 election—and raises concerns about the county’s readiness for another high-stakes election now just days away.

A previously unreported letter sent to county officials by Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in March 2025 confirms that finding, documenting a series of failures that state officials described as preventable. Among them: The county loaded final voter rolls onto its electronic pollbooks—devices used to check voters’ registration status, confirm they haven’t already voted, and issue the correct ballot to them—before Election Day, but failed to test them before shipping them across the county. It also lacked adequate plans and resources to respond when equipment malfunctioned.

With pollbooks failing, workers couldn’t print ballots on demand or reliably verify voters’ registrations. As the machines broke down, AZCIR and Votebeat found, so did communication. Records show poll workers didn’t know when a technician would be out to fix things or exactly what had gone wrong. Preprinted emergency ballots kept in reserve in case of technical glitches began to dwindle before noon. At some locations, accessible voting machines, essential for tribal elders who only speak Navajo, also malfunctioned. And voters couldn’t just go to other polling places—the county assigned them to specific sites.

Throughout the day, emails show that a small group of staffers worked desperately to try to fix the issues across the county, the sixth-largest in the country by area. Technicians drove hours on treacherous roads, crossing mountains and desolate mesas to deliver pollbook fixes to small communities. Still, records show the county’s Navajo precincts—those farthest from Apache’s white-majority county seat—were among the last to be fixed.

Until they were, voting was impossible or near impossible at many sites. Low temperatures, work and family obligations began to pull Navajo voters away from the polls—and, in some cases, records and interviews show people were turned away by overwhelmed poll workers. The secretary of state’s office also received reports of voters being improperly turned away during a court-ordered extension of polling hours, according to Fontes’ letter.

The problems continued after Election Day. The county was so busy dealing with the fallout from in-person voting that it fell behind on verifying signatures on mail ballots. As a result, around 30 voters with signature deficiencies weren’t given the chance to fix the issue until just two days before the deadline to do so. Many of those ballots were never counted.

Katherine Belzowski, an assistant attorney general for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, watched the election play out from afar. She said she was initially heartbroken and horrified. Later, she said, those emotions gave way to frustration as a lawyer for the county claimed in court that the average voter was still able to cast their ballot.

That attorney said her comments were made in “good faith.” But when AZCIR and Votebeat repeated her assertion to voters and representatives of the Navajo Nation, the reactions ranged from eye rolls to full-bodied laughter. The underlying sentiment was largely the same: The “average voter” referenced in court did not include the Navajo people.

“People were denied the right to vote left and right,” Belzowski said. “And then they were told it’s not a big deal.”

Since 2024, Apache County has instituted some changes to its election operations, including adopting a more flexible vote center model and replacing outdated voting equipment. Shortly after early voting began this year, Belzowski said she believed the county may have “turned a corner.” Fontes said the primary election had run smoothly in Apache County and described its progress as a “story of success.”

But AZCIR and Votebeat’s findings raise larger questions about what it will take to solve the region’s long history of disenfranchisement, and how long it has taken to address problems. In a 2018 federal lawsuit, the Navajo Nation claimed state- and county-level election practices had long disenfranchised its voters. That suit was settled the following year. And a report released earlier this year by the Native American Rights Fund found that voters in Indian Country face barriers during nearly every stage of the electoral process, particularly in Apache County and neighboring Navajo County.

Asked whether Apache’s recent changes would be enough to address the broader problems facing Navajo voters there, Fontes offered no guarantee.

“The answer is, (it’s) better in 2026 than it was in 2024,” Fontes said. “But it’s a fool’s errand to say that you’re going to be able to solve all the problems.”

6 a.m.: County offered little communication as machines went down

Frances Sjoberg was among the first to realize that something was wrong.

A lawyer with the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, Sjoberg had been assigned to observe the polls in Rock Point, a small village located about 20 miles south of the Arizona-Utah border. Within minutes of the community’s senior center opening its doors to voters, word began to spread that the printers inside weren’t working. A line began to grow.

Sjoberg promptly called the problem in to her colleagues and Arizona State University’s Indian Legal Clinic, which often represents tribes in voting cases. Her call was the first of several from observers and voters to the clinic, based hundreds of miles away in Phoenix. 

That proved difficult. Dolan called Vaughan at 6:33 a.m., according to court documents. She hit Vaughan’s voicemail, which was full and not accepting messages, according to a court affidavit. She then called the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office and notified Belzowski, who also began making inquiries.

Meanwhile, records show Vaughan was beginning to grasp the scale of the problem with the county’s pollbooks.

She didn’t immediately share what she’d learned with Dolan or the Navajo Nation Department of Justice. But she did tell her team—a skeleton crew of herself, her executive assistant, and five IT techs.

“IT IS A POLL BOOK ISSUE,” she emailed at 7:27 a.m.

To fix it, the techs would have to travel across the county’s 11,198-square-mile expanse, an area roughly the size of Maryland. They’d need to stop at each of its 40-plus voting sites, manually updating each pollbook by plugging in a USB drive preloaded with corrected software.

The first report of techs leaving to deploy the corrected software came at 9:09 a.m., when one went to a voting site in Concho, a non-Navajo community located about 20 minutes west of St. Johns, the county seat.

None of that, however, was in an update sent to Belzowski by the county’s attorney, Emily Craiger, at 10:12 a.m.—the first email from the county to tribal officials that day, according to records reviewed by AZCIR and Votebeat.

Craiger said people could keep voting because emergency ballots were available. They also could use the ExpressVote machines, she said.

Vaughan, who resigned as elections director in the weeks after the 2024 election and has since moved into a new role as the county’s human resources manager, did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent both through the county and to her directly.

Craiger said her comments on Election Day were based on information she received from the elections department.

10 a.m.: Voters walked away amid election chaos

As county officials scrambled to fix the problem, voters started to leave.

There was little that Carl R. Slater could do about it. As an elected delegate on the Navajo Nation Council, he was acting as a poll observer in Lukachukai, a small farming community nestled in mountain foothills almost three hours north of St. Johns. Slater was also informally monitoring other chapters in his council district. What he saw was a cascade of failures.

With pollbooks down, voters were relying on emergency ballots and ExpressVote machines. But in Round Rock, the ExpressVote machine froze in the morning, leaving emergency ballots as voters’ last resort. In St. Michaels, the polling site ran out of emergency ballots around 10 a.m., leaving voters at the mercy of the unreliable ExpressVote machine. Fort Defiance ran out of emergency ballots soon after.

When would-be voters saw the line at Lukachukai wasn’t moving, they grew restless. Eventually, people started to leave.

“At this point, we’ve probably turned away more people than decided the last elections,” Slater texted the Navajo Nation’s attorneys around 10:30 a.m.

In Rock Point, Sjoberg begged people to stay in the long line that now stretched into the plaza between the chapter house and the local senior center.

The day had begun deceptively sunny, but temperatures soon dropped and the wind sharpened. A blizzard was on the horizon, and people began to leave. Sjoberg went into triage mode.

“I started kind of hustling,” she said. “I was primarily focused at that moment to say, ‘Will you come back to vote?’”

Curley made the drive, but when she got to Cottonwood, she was again told they didn’t have her ballot. Workers there directed her to return to Window Rock.

Back where she started, minus a few gallons of gas, Curley insisted on voting and presented her ID. She was given a provisional ballot—a type of ballot that is used when there’s a question about the voter’s eligibility.

Curley wrote down the ballot’s tracking number. Two weeks later, she followed up with county officials to check if her ballot had counted.

“It didn’t,” Curley said. “They had no tracking of what happened.”

Others, like Wava White, couldn’t wait.

White, now 69, arrived at Fort Defiance mid-afternoon. Voting held a special significance to White, whose uncle died in the Vietnam War. As she viewed it, her family had bled for the right to vote, so she was initially undeterred by the line ahead.

But hours began to go by, and the line wasn’t moving. The sky grew dark. Even if White could make it to the voting booth, she still had an hourlong drive to her mother’s house.

When she asked a poll worker how much longer it would take before she could vote, she was given an estimate of another three hours.

White wouldn’t learn until the next day that returning later to vote had been an option. Speaking with reporters inside a small coffee shop in Window Rock nearly two years later, she said she is still gutted by the experience.

“Every four years, we vote,” White said, referring to the presidential election cycle. “And they can’t get this right.”

7 p.m.: Court extends voting hours, but it’s too late for some voters 

An hour before the polls closed, a handful of officials and attorneys joined a virtual court hearing on the day’s voting problems.

“An average voter who wanted to vote today would have the opportunity to do it,” Craiger said to the court. She was based in the Phoenix area, along with most of the other lawyers on the call, and admitted that she was unfamiliar with the geography of Apache County. Still, she maintained that voters could use ExpressVote machines while technicians fixed the pollbooks and that they’d already had several hours to vote after those problems were resolved. “We acknowledge that there were longer lines than usual in Apache County, but that all voters had the ability to vote today and continue to have that ability right now,” she said.

Yet as Craiger spoke, records show pollbooks were still malfunctioning at Canyon de Chelly, a precinct in the heart of the Navajo Nation. Emails indicate county techs had visited the site, a county office, in the morning but returned shortly after 6 p.m. to fix two pollbooks. It’s unclear whether the return visit was prompted by the same pollbook issues as that morning; records suggest no other precincts experienced further pollbook problems.

One technician, Matt Lovell, noted in emails to Vaughan that the location had a “huge line” that evening and that he’d observed poll workers attempt to turn away voters not found in the system. Lovell, who now heads the county’s IT department, declined an interview with AZCIR and Votebeat.

Craiger also said in court that emergency paper ballots remained available while IT staff crisscrossed the county to fix pollbooks and that “additional paper ballots were deployed to the voting locations so that voting could continue.” Vaughan would not speak with Votebeat or AZCIR to clarify the chain of events; Craiger said she was relaying information from the elections department and declined to comment further.

Craiger further argued that spotty cell service would make it nearly impossible to quickly notify Navajo Nation polling sites about extended hours, while the reservation’s vast distances would complicate delivery of additional provisional ballots, which must be used any time polling hours are extended.

Latham ultimately ordered a two-hour extension at only the nine sites where the day’s technical issues were most clearly documented.

Minutes later, Canyon de Chelly’s pollbooks were finally fixed. But unlike neighboring Chinle, the site was not granted an additional two hours of voting.

After Election Day, Apache County struggled to keep up with ballots

Even in a normal election, a disproportionate number of voters cast provisional ballots in Apache County. There are often more questions about voters’ eligibility on tribal lands, where voters frequently lack residential addresses and might describe where they live using physical or natural landmarks, making their exact locations difficult to verify.

But due to the chaos, the 2024 election saw even more provisional ballots cast than usual—more than 3,500. That type of ballot requires the county recorder’s office to later verify voters’ eligibility and precinct. With only a handful of full-time employees, the office quickly became overwhelmed in the days following the election.

Keely Varvel, chief of staff at the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, sent a handful of staffers to assist Apache County. But processing the mound of provisional ballots delayed yet another critical task, she said: verifying signatures on mail ballots.

In Arizona, voters can drop mail ballots off at the polls on Election Day. But state law gives only a five-day window for those ballots to be verified and for voters to fix, or “cure,” any issues with their signatures and ensure their votes are counted. That means election officials are typically under immense pressure to process mail ballots quickly and do as much voter outreach as possible before the cure deadline.

In Apache County, records show about 30 voters were first contacted on Nov. 8, just two days before the cure deadline. Court testimony suggests that some others may not have been contacted until Nov. 9. Records show 14 voters contacted late subsequently saw their ballot rejected.

Some likely didn’t know that the county was trying to reach them at all, as records indicate the recorder’s office lacked up-to-date contact information for many voters. When officials hit dead phone numbers, they had no way to leave a voicemail or send a text message, and no time to mail a letter.

The recorder’s office declined to speak with AZCIR and Votebeat for this story, citing staffing limitations.

The curing scramble led the Navajo Nation to file yet another lawsuit, this time requesting that the county extend its cure period by three days. Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, an attorney representing the Nation, said in court that tribal members had been “denied their fundamental right to vote on equal footing with Arizona citizens.”

Craiger countered in court that the county had made “reasonable efforts” to reach voters. She called the lawsuit “speculative,” noting that lawyers hadn’t identified any voters who claimed to be disenfranchised—though Ferguson-Bohnee noted many voters “probably do not know if they are on that cure list.”

In the end, Latham ruled for the county, finding that voters were “properly notified, pursuant to statutory requirements” of inconsistent signatures.

But he went on to detail infrastructure challenges that might interfere with Navajo Nation voters’ ability to cast a ballot—including dirt roads, poor internet connectivity, and limited mail service.

Latham acknowledged that additional protections could help rural and tribal voters, but he laid that responsibility squarely at the feet of state lawmakers.

“The court lacks authority to craft legal remedies beyond what the law allows even though certain remedies may assist rural communities,” he wrote. “That is something the Arizona State Legislature has the power to address.”

But it hasn’t.

Years later, are changes enough to prevent another 2024?

Much has changed in Apache County since Nov. 5, 2024.

Earlier this year, the board of supervisors voted to start using vote centers instead of precinct-based polling places, a change long pushed by tribal and state officials that will allow voters to cast ballots at any polling site in the county. The secretary of state’s office had provided equipment that could have supported such a model in 2024—and likely mitigated at least some of the problems voters faced there—but the county declined to use it, according to Fontes’ March 2025 letter.

The county’s elections department, using federal grant funds, replaced its outdated ExpressVote devices. It also hired a new elections director, Megan Hill, who declined to discuss the changes made by the department. An individual familiar with the changes said the county also adopted an informal policy restricting pollbook programming updates shortly before elections, except for security purposes.

In the recorder’s office, officials have worked to update voter records in an effort to cut down on provisional ballots and rejected mail ballots. The office also gained a new temporary employee through a state fellowship program.

Fontes emphasized how far the county has come, saying it has progressed “miles and miles and miles” from where it was in 2024. He also said it was worth considering whether his office should require counties to test pollbooks and limit programming changes before elections, with carveouts for critical security updates.

Yet for all the changes Apache County has made, its longstanding staffing and funding challenges remain. In his letter, Fontes warned that the state could not continue sending employees to help Apache County process provisional ballots after elections. He urged county officials to provide adequate personnel and resources, noting the difficulty of administering elections across a vast county with a limited tax base.

Arizona law prohibits counties from accepting private funding, including grants, for election administration, even as state lawmakers have increased the responsibilities of local election officials. The law, passed in 2021 by the Republican-controlled Legislature, was described as a voter confidence and election integrity measure. Sjoberg, with the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, said repealing or amending it could help counties pay for more accessible voting machines and poll workers.

The Legislature has also imposed new proof-of-residency requirements, shortened the period for curing mail ballots and expanded automatic recounts in recent years, among other changes. Starting in 2027, county recorders will be required to remove voters from the state’s early voting list if they fail to cast a mail ballot in federal, state, or certain municipal elections over a four-year period.

“There are so many hoops that the election directors have to jump through, and the county recorders have to jump through, that it just makes it unrealistic for any county that doesn’t have a certain amount of income,” said Belzowski, the Navajo Nation’s assistant attorney general.

Fontes was more pointed in his criticism.

“The Legislature does not want to fund elections administration,” said Fontes, a Democrat. “They want to complain about it a lot, but they don’t want to fund it, and that’s the core of all of the issues we’ve had over many, many, many years.”

State lawmakers could also address some of the barriers Navajo voters face at the polls. Arizona could adopt protections similar to those in neighboring New Mexico, for instance, where Native American communities have a say in polling locations, ballot box placements and precinct boundaries. Belzowski said the voting landscape there is far easier for underresourced counties and tribal voters to navigate.

“I think New Mexico wants to encourage people to vote,” Belzowski said. “I think Arizona is more interested in keeping people from voting.”

Republican and Democratic leaders in the Arizona Legislature did not respond to a request for comment on whether they’d support changes to state law that could improve voting in Apache County, particularly on tribal land.

Dolan, who now researches voting access in Indian Country at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said she no longer directs all of her frustration toward Apache County. She described the 2024 election as a failure on the part of the state as a whole and said it will take more than changes at the county level to solve the continuous disenfranchisement of Navajo voters.

“I realize that these are people who are working under impossible circumstances, and my frustration is dispersed amongst the institutions that made this this way,” Dolan said.

For Navajo voters, election problems are so common they’ve become “part of the living memory there,” she added. “So, no one’s ever indignant,” she said. “They’re frustrated, but they’re not shocked.”

That history led White, of Fort Defiance, to make a different plan for voting this year. This time, she arranged to receive her ballot by mail and said she would drop it off at a county office.

She told AZCIR and Votebeat she would be watching what happens on Election Day.

“If there’s a glitch, fix it,” she said, adding that she was “sure something would have been done really quick” if pollbooks failed en masse in Phoenix.

AZCIR reporter Molly Bohannon and former Votebeat Arizona senior reporter Jen Fifield contributed reporting.

Graphics by Thomas Wilburn.

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