Voter behavior and election rules contribute to slow counts in Arizona
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| An election worker arrives with ballots to be tabulated inside the Maricopa County recorder's office in Phoenix on Wednesday. |
Election officials in the swing state of Arizona are still processing and counting hundreds of thousands of ballots cast during this year's midterm elections, leaving the results of key races in the balance.
Experts say a combination of changes in Arizona's voting laws and voter behavior is to blame for long waits for vote totals, and tight margins mean outlets like the Associated Press can't call some contests.
Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County Election Officer, mostly as a federal compliance officer. Maricopa is home to Phoenix and more than half of the state's electorate.
Patrick says not much has changed since his time in the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona. But she says there are voter behavior and political realities.
For one, Patrick says he thinks voters in Arizona have changed their voting behavior in response to all the misinformation circulating about mail-in ballots.
"The buzz around voting by mail is that it's ripe with fraud and ... you shouldn't count on it," she says.
This mistrust, Patrick says, may be why more voters decide to drop off their ballot at the polling place on Election Day as opposed to mailing it in advance.
“It is common for Maricopa County to see approximately 180,000 ballots cast on Election Day,” she says. "That was the standard number when I was there for that decade."
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However, this year, local elections officials reported that 290,000 ballots were dropped off at polling places on Election Day.
"So, we don't know if it's because voters have heard these stories about drop boxes being a way to spoil your ballot or because they saw the vigilantes and the monitors and some of them Didn't feel comfortable leaving at the drop box." says Patrick.
Patrick says voters may have heard the message about voting on Election Day being a better option, and decided to turn in a pre-existing mail ballot instead of waiting in line.
"What's so challenging in this moment is really understanding who these voters were and what their motivations were," she says.
criticism and comparison
Whatever the cause of the flood, though, election officials now have to process and tabulate all those ballots. That is, signature verification and ballots are being scrutinized by bipartisan teams.
Patrick says that one thing that can speed up the process is an "extraction" machine. Many counties in Florida in particular use an internal device that cuts the top of the envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, making the ballot much easier to remove.
"It's very, very quick compared to sitting there with the letter openers on the processing board opening literally over a million envelopes," she says.
Arizona and Florida have broadly similar deadlines and processing rules for mail ballots, although some of the smaller rules and procedures - such as the inhouse extraction Patrick described - provide some important differences. Regardless, Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right who criticize Arizona's election management.
Those targeting Arizona's election management are Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor, and Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state. Both Lake and Finchem have echoed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Counting is still going on across the country
Despite state laws and practices, the U.S. Nearly all jurisdictions in the U.S. are still technically counting and processing votes.
In Leon County, Fla., officials there said in a statement that even though they have an "overwhelming majority of ballots and election results reported by election night," there is still work to be done. This includes processing provisional ballots and ballots from abroad.
Patrick says, even though the media calls the race on election night, "there is no state in the country that announces winners on election day because they still have a lot of work to do," which includes signing mail ballots and foreigners. Involves processing votes.
Ultimately, she says, Arizona is subject to such scrutiny because of the political significance of the results of major races there, as well as how close vote margins are in Arizona. She says because the media feels less comfortable calling out the race right now, the perception is that it's going to take longer.
"It's always how long it takes," Patrick says. "The work continues until every eligible vote has been counted."