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Update, Nov. 10: The Arizona Supreme Court declined to extend the curing deadline, ruling that it had received no proof that voters had been disenfranchised.
Update, Nov. 9: American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center filed an emergency petition to the Arizona Supreme Court on Saturday morning, asking the court to extend the deadline for voters to respond to problems with their mail ballot signatures. The original deadline is 5 p.m. Sunday. Because of the delays in counting ballots and notifying voters of problems, the organizations want voters to be given an additional two to four days to respond to notices, depending on how officials notify voters there is a problem.
It’s taking far longer than expected in multiple counties across Arizona to count ballots and report election results.
The delay means numerous congressional, statewide, and local races have yet to be called, including a U.S. Senate contest and races that would help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House. Voter advocates are warning that voters won’t have enough time to fix any problems with their ballots if the counting goes on too long.
An updated statewide number of uncounted ballots wasn’t available Friday morning, but as of Thursday night, four of 15 counties — Cochise, Pima, Yavapai, and Yuma — still had more than 25% of their ballots left to count.
Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, still had about 20% uncounted as of Thursday night, including 274,000 mail ballots that had not yet gone through even the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope.
The long, two-page ballot that many counties had in this election was to blame for delays in at least some instances. For example, in Maricopa County and Pima County, it’s taking longer to remove mail ballots from their envelopes and unfold and inspect them.
In other counties, the problems vary. Cochise County is experiencing a mechanical problem with its tabulators that’s causing them to operate slowly, and still had 57% of its ballots to count as of Thursday night. The county was able to count only a few ballots at a time over the last day, though the tabulator is still counting correctly, according to JP Martin, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office. A technician from the tabulator company arrived Thursday night to help, and the company may need to send a new machine, Martin said.
In both Yavapai and Pinal counties, tabulating polling place results from Election Day took much longer than expected because of unclear voter marks that had to be sorted out before results from the polling place could be reported. Pinal took 24 hours to count just the polling place ballots, and Yavapai took until Friday morning.
“I know people are clamoring for results, but we are doing the best we can here,” Yavapai County Elections Director Laurin Custis said Friday morning.
Yuma County still had 40% of its ballots to count as of Thursday night, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. It’s unclear why.
A coalition of dozens of voting rights groups are concerned that, because of the delays, voters will not have enough time to respond to counties that flagged a mismatched or missing signature on their mail ballots. Under state law, the deadline for fixing those issues is Sunday, while counties had not yet reviewed hundreds of thousands of voter signatures on ballots across the state as of Thursday night.
The groups wrote in a news release Friday afternoon that they support extending the deadline. They said all voters should have five days from when they are notified of a problem to fix their signature.
“We support community groups and candidates of any party fighting for voters’ rights to have adequate time to respond to any questions about the signatures on their ballots to ensure their votes are counted,” the groups wrote in a statement.
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
