An elections official arrives with a tabulated ballot inside the Maricopa County recording office in Phoenix on Wednesday.
Matt York / AP
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Matt York / AP
An elections official arrives with a tabulated ballot inside the Maricopa County recording office in Phoenix on Wednesday.
Matt York / AP
Election officials in the state of Arizona still handle and count hundreds of thousands of votes cast in this year’s midterm elections, leaving the results of key races in limbo.
Experts say a combination of Arizona’s voting laws and changing voter behavior is to blame for the long waits for vote totals, and tight margins mean agencies as the Associated Press cannot call certain campaigns.
Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser with the Democratic Foundation, spent a decade working as the Maricopa County elections official, primarily as a federal compliance officer. Maricopa is home to Phoenix and more than half of the state’s voters.
Patrick said that matters related to how elections are held in Arizona haven’t changed much since she was there. But she says voter behavior and political reality both have.
First, Patrick said that she thinks voters in Arizona changed their voting behavior in response to all the misinformation that has been spread about mail-in ballots.
“There’s been a story around voting by mail that it’s ripe with fraud and … you shouldn’t believe it,” she said.
This distrust may be why many voters decide to cast their ballots at a polling place on Election Day, Patrick said, rather than mailing a few days in advance.
“It is typical for Maricopa County to see about 180,000 ballots shipped on Election Day,” she said. “When I was there in that decade, it was a standard number.”
This year, however, local election officials reported that a whopping 290,000 ballots were cast at polling places on Election Day.
“So we don’t know if it’s because voters have heard these stories around drop boxes being a bad way to transfer your ballot or because they’ve seen watchers and followers Patrick said.
Voters may also have heard the announcement that voting on Election Day was a better option, Patrick said, and decided to mail the ballot they already had instead of waiting in line.
“It’s very difficult in this moment to really understand who these voters are and what their motivations are,” she said.
Criticize and compare
However, whatever the reason for this flow, election officials must process and tabulate all those ballots. That means signature verification and votes are checked by bipartisan groups.
One thing that can speed up this process, Patrick says, is a “mining” machine. In particular, many counties in Florida use an internal device to laser cut the top of the envelope and then open the envelope with air, which makes ballot removal much easier.
“That’s a lot faster than literally having the processor sit there with the mail opener opening over a million envelopes,” she says.
Broadly speaking, Arizona and Florida also have deadline and Processing rules for vote-by-mail, although some of the smaller regulations and procedures – like the internal exploit Patrick described – offer some main difference. Despite that, Florida has become a popular comparison point to rightists critical of Arizona’s election management.
Among those targeting Arizona’s election administration are Lake KariGOP candidate for governor, and Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Both Lake and Finchem lied that the 2020 election was stolen.
Counting is still going on nationwide
Even so, regardless of state laws and practices, virtually all jurisdictions in the United States are still technically counting and processing votes.
In Leon County, Fla., officials there said in a statement that although they “gave the majority of the vote and the election results were reported on election night,” there was still work to be done. That includes handling provisional ballots and ballots from abroad.
Patrick said that even as the media called the races on election night, “no state across the country declared a winner on Election Day because they still had a lot of work to do,” including This includes correcting mail-in ballot signatures and processing overseas ballots.
Ultimately, she said, Arizona is under such close scrutiny mainly because of the political importance of the results of key races there, as well as how close the share of votes has been achieved. in Arizona. She said because the media feels uncomfortable calling the race right now, it is aware that this will take longer.
“This is about how long it always takes,” says Patrick. “Work continues until every eligible vote counts.”
