Why Election Day results will be delayed in Arizona

The results of ballots cast on Maricopa County’s Election Day will be delayed due to a Republican-backed change in state law, a delay that could fuel false claims as the country awaits the outcome of the presidential race .

The expected delay stems from a new state law enacted in February that requires poll workers to count the number of ballot envelopes delivered to the location before delivering results to the central counting facility. This is just an initial count number of ballot papers. The votes on these ballots will be counted later Voters’ signatures on the ballot are verified.

Still, the task will take time. In previous elections, more than 1,500 mail-in ballots were dropped off at busy locations on election day.

Maricopa County — one of the few closely watched swing counties in a later time zone — will not provide an estimate of when officials expect polling places to return.

“Once I give a time, I will be held accountable for it until the end of time,” said county elections spokesperson Jennifer Liewer, adding that “the new requirement to count certified envelopes is too much of a factor to make a prediction. .”

During the primaries, most polling places in Maricopa did not report results until 10:55 p.m., while the final results from polling places were not announced until 1:15 a.m. For a number of reasons, the results will likely come out even later in the upcoming elections.

First, lines of voters are expected to linger on Election Day after the polls close at 7:00 PM local time, and people in line at that time are entitled to vote; during the primaries there were few lines. Second, the ballot paper is much longer than in the past – two sheets, front and back – meaning voters who line up late will take longer to make their choice. Poll workers must wait until all voters are ready and the site is closed before beginning to count dropped-off ballots.

Republicans normally push election officials to release results as quickly as possible. But Republican state lawmakers pushed for the new counting requirement as a way to ensure that the number of ballots delivered at each location is documented before the ballots are brought to the central counting facility.

They included the measure in crucial legislation that Democratic and Republican lawmakers were working on to shorten Arizona’s election timeline to meet federal deadlines, even though the counting requirement has nothing to do with that timeline. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, signed the bipartisan agreement legislation on February 9.

On hearing that the requirement will delay results on election night, Republican state Rep. Alex Kolodin, who led the advocacy for his party’s measure, said: “This small delay will give voters more time to toast the improved security of the election system. .”

But some voters didn’t feel this way in November 2020, when counting wasn’t finished the day after Election Day. At the time, Donald Trump’s supporters crowded outside the Maricopa County election center and demanded that workers stop counting ballots. Since then, including last week, Republican leaders — and Trump supporter Elon Musk — have said the county’s lengthy timeline indicates incompetence or fraud.

It is unclear when media organizations will have enough information to determine who won the presidential contest in the state. A large number of voters in the state wait until Election Day before dropping off their ballots at a polling place. (In the 2022 election, about a third of Maricopa County voters, or about 290,000 people, did this.) Those ballots are not counted until the voter’s signature is verified, which happens in the days after Election Day.

In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump by about 10,000 votes in Arizona. In those elections, the Associated Press so-called state presidential contest for Biden shortly before 1 a.m. But in 2022, the AP waited until six days after the election to call the governor’s race for Katie Hobbs, who ultimately won by a margin of 17,000 votes.

What order will Arizona’s election results come in?

Arizonans vote over a period of weeks, in a variety of ways: by mail, by ballot box, in person, or in person on Election Day. But their votes are tabulated and results are reported in a specific order after the polls close.

The first available results from Arizona reflect all early ballots cast before Election Day, up to a certain point. Normally, these results include all in-person early voting and mail-in ballots received through the weekend before the election.

Counties typically upload these early voting results at 8 p.m. on election night.

The next round of results will come from voters casting ballots in person at the polls on Election Day.

In many counties, including Maricopa County, voters place their completed paper ballots directly into local tabulation machines. The results are stored on portable USB drives in the devices and returned securely to a central counting facility, where they are uploaded to a results computer.

For those counties using on-site tabulation machines, results will be available shortly after the USB drives are delivered to the central counting facility. Maricopa County is releasing these results in batches as they come from locations across the county. And all Arizona counties aim to announce all Election Day results before workers leave that day.

In November 2020, the first polling place results came in at 10:15 p.m., according to ABC 15 data analyst Garrett Archer, who tracks election night results. In November 2022, Archer said, results from a small number of sites were uploaded at 9:46 p.m., followed by a larger upload at 10:45 p.m.

The province could not confirm the timing of previous years’ results. For this year’s August primary, after the new counting requirement went into effect, results from a small number of locations near the central counting facility were uploaded at 9:30 p.m., and even more at 10:55 p.m., according to Maricopa’s Liewer.

In some locations during the primaries, it took hours for the last voters to leave, workers to count envelopes, and USB drives to arrive at central counting facilities: the final round of in-person voting results were loaded at 1:15 a.m. am

After Election Day, the next publicly reported results are from mail-in ballots received by counties in the days just before the election. Typically, some of these results are posted the following evening, once voter signatures have been verified.

The last ballots to be counted are those mailed and received on Election Day, or dropped off at polling places or in ballot drop boxes on Election Day. Normally, provinces will update results once a day until all results are in.

More staff, but also more last-minute voting

The legislation passed this year brought other changes that could affect the timing of the results.

If workers flag a voter’s ballot for a signature mismatch, or if a voter casts a provisional ballot that requires additional information or documentation to count, Arizona law allowed the voter five business days to resolve the issue unload. With the new law, lawmakers changed that to five calendar days for this election. This could help counties process and count all ballots sooner.

In 2022, Maricopa County had 99.2% of ballots counted by the end of the five-business day recovery period. It took thirteen days for all the ballots to be counted.

This year, Maricopa County has hired more workers to verify signatures and get last-minute ballots counted. That seemed to help in the primaries. The final results were announced just six days after the election, which was the fastest the county had counted in at least the last ten statewide primaries.

But the county also expects more last-minute mail-in ballots to be delivered: 350,000 compared to 290,000 in November 2022.

In past years, poll workers have not had to tally these dropped-off ballots at the polling place, so it’s unclear how many will arrive at the busiest locations this year.

In the primaries, 86,756 voters dropped off mail-in ballots at polling places. More than 1,000 ballots had been returned at seven of the 222 polling places, and most other ballots were in the hundreds, according to a Votebeat review of the county’s published figures. 1,855 ballots were delivered to the busiest location.

The county estimates it will take 10 to 12 days to count all the ballots for the November election, which is about average compared to previous elections.

But voters should expect races to be called sooner unless there is a winning margin so tight that it triggers an automatic recount. The state is expected to release final statewide results on Nov. 25.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at (email protected).