No, John McCain did not come in second to Mitt Romney in Cochise County. 
A computer glitch that kept counting five polling places over and over again — for five times — caused the reporting error through late Tuesday night, Cochise County Election Office Tom Schelling said
When the Herald/Review ran the results in Wednesday morning’s paper, the Republican leader in Cochise County was former Massachusetts governor with a 41.4 percent of the vote to Arizona U.S. Sen. McCain’s 40.5 percent.

Not only was the report in the Herald/Review wrong, but so were the total votes cast, which initially led county election officials to declare that nearly 85 percent of eligible Republican and Democratic voters in the county had cast ballots.

After finding the computer error, which was fixed after the county sent its final report to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office well after midnight, a recount made after the computer problem was fixed led to McCain garnering 4,228 votes, or 40.73 percent, to Romney’s 4,131 votes, or 39.79 percent, Schelling said.

That lowered the Republican and Democratic participation in the presidential preference election in the county to 42.16 percent when the number of people who went to the 18 polling places, 16,050, and early ballots, 3,482, were counted, he said. Former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee’s final total was 1,326 votes or 12.71 percent, Ron Paul’s was 430 or 4.14 percent and Alan Keyes who got 39 votes or 0.38 percent.

Also on the Republican ballot were some Republicans who have dropped out of the race, including Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Rudy Giuliani.

As with the Democrats, a number of Arizona residents had their names on the state’s Republican presidential preference election bring the total number on the ballot to 24 people.

There was no overall change in the Democratic leader  list  with  Sen.  Hillary Clinton still winning  the county, with 51.96 percent of the vote, or 4,719, compared to Sen. Barack Obama’s 40.27 percent, or 3,657 votes.

Before the computer problem was fixed, 12 of the 18 polling places in the county reported Clinton as having 9,021 votes, or 50.27 percent, to Obama’s 7,745 votes, or 43.1 percent. “It was a cumulative (computer) error that just kept adding the results for five polling places every time new figures were added,” Schelling said.

The error got worse when the cumulative error went through five updates.

It was then realized the total number of ballots cast according to the wrong report was more than the people registered in the county, Schelling said.
 
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