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FLORENCE, Arizona — In the early morning hours after Election Day, shortly after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had claimed victory, thousands of ballots from polling places were still piled up high in this town’s elections building, waiting to be tallied.
This was the moment, Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis later recalled, that she realized her staff needed to start taking breaks. She began to tell some of the workers who were feeding paper ballots into tabulation machines to find a spot in the building to take a short nap, or to go get some food.
She realized, in other words, that it was going to be a while until they were done counting Election Day ballots, and they weren’t going home until they did.
Pinal County, the fast-growing neighbor of Maricopa County, ultimately took more than 24 hours to count all the ballots cast at polling places.
That’s unusual, even in Arizona, a state known for its long counting period. The ballots in the state that typically take a long time to count are the early-voting ballots that are dropped off at voting sites on Election Day and still need to have voter signatures verified. Ballots cast in person on Election Day, on the other hand, are typically counted by early the following morning.
One process in particular was slowing them down, Lewis told Votebeat Wednesday afternoon: dealing with unclear marks that voters at polling places made on their ballots. A bipartisan team of workers had to review these marks to determine what the voter intended, and prepare new ballots based on those determinations. Lewis’ staff underestimated how many voters would make such marks, and how machines and staff they would need to resolve them.
By Wednesday, some pressure was off the county to finish counting, because the presidential race had already been called. If this had been 2020, the nation would have been waiting for Pinal County’s Election Day ballots.
The county is one of the fastest-growing in the nation, and that means that each election, more ballots are cast there. The county’s election systems and staffing have struggled to keep up, and the consequences of that just seem to keep coming. County officials thought their new, larger elections center and revamped processes would help them get faster, more accurate results.
But officials failed to foresee the potential bottleneck in determining voter intent from marks on the ballot.
Around 3% to 5% of the roughly 44,000 ballots cast at polling places had unclear marks, which Lewis said was more than usual. When you vote in person, you can request a new ballot if you mess up. Lewis said that because of the long ballot this year, she assumes people didn’t want to start over and made marks on their ballots instead.
There are many reasons why a tabulation machine might not know what to do with a mark on the ballot, including ballots where someone accidentally marks both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris but then circles one to make it obvious what choice they meant to make. After the bipartisan team decides the voters’ intent, they must transfer all of the voters’ choices onto a new ballot, using an accessible voting device.
“You would see them tabulate, then you would see this entire wall line up with people,” Lewis said, pointing through the glass wall in the observation room to a line of accessible devices in the tabulation room.
In Maricopa, the state’s largest county, Election Day ballots are tabulated on site at polling places, so there are no voter intent questions to resolve later. To determine voter intent for early ballots cast in the county, election officials use a different, faster electronic system. A computer highlights the contest on the ballot that needs attention, and it takes only a click or two of a button for the teams of reviewers to make the choice, which they record on a written log.
Lewis said she was thinking through different options for how to deliver faster results next time. That might mean switching to Maricopa’s electronic system, she said, although she is worried about the lack of transparency that might come with it.
“Yes, political observers get to see it, but it just feels awkward right now,” Lewis said.
Lewis said she will also consider whether the county should hire more staff and buy more machines. She might have added a rotating staff, had she known they would still be there at 2 p.m. the next day, she said. Or the county could start tabulating ballots on site at its voting locations, as Maricopa County does. That would cost a lot of money, and require a lot of new training.
But something needs to change before the next election, Lewis said. She got just two hours of sleep overnight — in one-hour increments — and she and her team had a long day ahead of them.
At 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, the county put out its final Election Day results. It was time to start on the last of the early ballots, with about 20,000 left to go.
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
