Conducting an election in Arizona’s Coconino County involves a helicopter ride

One of the Coconino County’s voting locations in Supai Village isn’t accessible by road.

Flagstaff is about 150 miles north of Phoenix, and it’ll be where Coconino County counts all its votes for the November general election. That’s County Recorder Patty Hansen’s domain, as she helps administrate the 2024 election in Arizona’s northernmost county.

“I want people to realize we take this very very seriously, and we don’t care who wins. As long as they win by wide margins. We hate recounts,” she said with a smile.

Arizona has a decentralized elections system. That means each county is responsible for administering their own elections, with their own board of supervisors, recorder, and elections director overseeing mail-in voting, early voting, voting on election day, and counting the ballots.

As the recorder in Coconino County, Hansen is responsible for voter registration and early voting. Her office also reviews and verifies all mail-in ballots to confirm the identity of voters before the ballot is officially counted.

Hers is an elected office, and Hansen has consistently won the seat since 2012. It’s clear that she cares a lot about the job.

RELATED: Here’s every school board seat up for grabs in Coconino County this November

“We do this because we believe in our country and in our democracy, and people being able to vote,” she said. “And I know to my core that our country is the strongest when everybody’s voice is heard.”

It’s not an easy job. Coconino County takes up roughly 20% of the total land mass of Arizona, but is home to just 2% of the state’s population. It stretches east to west from the Navajo Nation to Hualapai Indian Reservation, and north to south from Page to Sedona.

It takes over two hours to get to Flagstaff from Page, and one of the county’s voting locations in Supai Village isn’t even accessible by road.

“We have two county employees that go down to help with conducting the election, and they helicopter in and out and stay at the lodge down there,” Hansen said.

The county also has to do outreach to Native American voters in the Hualapai Indian Reservation and Navajo Nation, where there can be difficulty translating the spoken language to written.

“Both of those languages are oral languages,” Hansen said. “They’re not traditionally written, so it’s mostly the elderly voters that need language translation services, and they don’t always read Navajo or Hopi, and you can’t mail them an interpreter.”

That’s where outreach and training come in.

Once polls close on Election Day, poll workers work alongside the sheriff’s department to transport ballots to central counting in Flagstaff. It’s not unheard of for ballots to reach tabulators at midnight.

From there, anyone can watch a live feed of ballots being counted.

Hansen said the election administration challenges are much different from the ones being politicized—like noncitizens voting, for example.

“I’ve asked [people] to please provide me a name of the person,” Hansen said. “I’ve been doing election administration for 37 years and I’ve just seen no evidence of it.”

The real issues, she said, include training poll workers, crossing the distance between central counting and polling locations, and ensuring people who do not speak English as a first language are given proper accommodations to vote.

“The elections department needs to train poll workers, and the best type of training is hands-on and in-person,” Hansen said. “So scheduling all that across the county and delivering election day voting supplies is quite the effort.”

See who’s on your ballot here, and check your voter registration here.