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Arizona is still waiting on election results it expected to have by Wednesday morning, with some ballots cast at polling places on Election Day yet uncounted, along with hundreds of thousands of early ballots from Maricopa County.
In Maricopa County, the county’s two-page ballot — which took longer than anticipated to remove from envelopes and prepare for counting — meant the county fell behind in processing.
Across the rest of the state, Election Day results were still trickling in Wednesday after counting in Pinal County fell behind and a court ordered Apache County polling places to stay open later on Tuesday night. Typically, counties report results from all precincts overnight. Many counties still had precincts to report as of 11 a.m. Wednesday, according to a tracker on the Secretary of State’s Office website.
In Maricopa County, officials estimated on Tuesday night that they still had about 700,000 early ballots to process. Typically, in the first round of results at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, the county releases the results from all early ballots cast up to the Friday before Election Day. This time, that round included only ballots received up until Oct. 29, a week before Election Day.
It’s taking workers nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat, and check for damage, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told Votebeat on Tuesday morning outside the tabulation center. It’s the first time in nearly 20 years that the county’s ballots stretched to a second page.
Richer had given mixed signals at a news conference on Monday on whether the county was behind in processing ballots, saying that the two-page ballot had led to some delays, but also that the county was on track compared with prior years.
The county added a third overnight shift of ballot processors last week to try to address the backlog, but that decision was made too late, and there is not enough time to catch up before Thursday.
The county’s first round of results at 8 p.m. Tuesday included about 1.1 million early ballots received by the county by Oct. 29 according to a county news release. County officials had said that, as of Monday morning, they had received about 1.5 million early ballots.
The results from early ballots that they had not yet processed from before Monday, as well as any received after that point, in the mail or dropped off at polling places, will be released Wednesday and in the coming days. The total expected turnout was 2.1 million, and the county said it would release the number of early ballots that were dropped off at the polls on Wednesday.
Richer said he believes the county will be mostly done processing ballots by this weekend. The cure period for voters to fix problems with their ballots ends Sunday.
Maricopa County released all Election Day results — from about 269,000 voters — by about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday. These voters cast ballots directly into tabulation machines at the polls, and the results are reported as soon as election workers can get the memory cards from the machines to the central counting facility in downtown Phoenix.
A new law requiring poll workers to count the number of early ballots dropped off at polling places before leaving their sites appears to have delayed final Election Day results by an hour or two compared with prior elections.
In other counties, ballots are not counted until they reach central counting facilities. That includes Pinal County, where workers weren’t able overnight to handle the volume of ballots coming in from precincts, and were still counting in the morning, according to a county spokesperson.
The county had reported Election Day results from only about half of precincts as of 8:45 a.m. Wednesday.
Other counties still had Election Day results remaining to be reported at that time as well. In Apache County, that may be because of the court order, which instructed the county to keep nine polling places open until 9 p.m., two hours later than planned, after polling places across the county experienced technical issues that led to long lines.
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
