The unfortunate answer may be another two weeks.
Image courtesy of the Washington Post, annotations by Mish.
Arizona Central addresses the issue Why does it take Arizona so long to count votes? This problem is fixable
While the rest of the country is moving on, we in Arizona are stuck in an election night time warp. Waiting to see whether we sent Ruben Gallego or Kari Lake to Washington.
Maricopa County elections officials have said it’ll take 10 to 13 days to finish counting votes.
It’s embarrassing. It’s frustrating. It’s ridiculous. And worst of all, it gets the conspiracy crowd all riled up, certain that there’s a plot afoot to steal Arizona’s vote.
Don’t blame (Republican run) Maricopa County. From what I’ve seen, the board of supervisors ran a remarkably smooth election.
it’s just not realistic that nearly a quarter of a million people can drop off early ballots on Election Day, then expect to know who won a close race on election night.
Unexpected Problems Counting Ballots
VoteBeat explains Arizona election results delayed as counties experience unexpected problems counting ballots
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.
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.
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.
Four Key Things
Arizona allows “early” votes to be dropped off on election day.
Then the first step is a manual signature verification.
If the signature verification fails, voters get a chance to verify it.
And now it’s possible, if not likely, the Arizona Supreme Court will extend the cure figure.
Every one of those will fuel conspiracy theories by the losing party.
My Math
I crunched the numbers. There are four key counties in play.
Tiny Cochise county may deliver 9,000 more votes for Kari Lake because so many votes are outstanding.
But even if we assume reasonably good totals for Lake in Maricopa County (Phoenix), say even instead -3.6 percent, it looks like Pima County (Tucson) will carry the day for Gallego if the turnout is close to what we have seen.
Lake can win if she dramatically outperforms in the rest of the Maricopa County vote.
But from where I sit, it looks like Kari Lake loses by about 1.0 to 1.6 percent.
Regardless, Arizona seriously needs to rethink how it runs elections.
Trump Will Have a Second Chance to put a Gold Advocate on the Fed, Go For It!
In case you missed it, please see Trump Will Have a Second Chance to put a Gold Advocate on the Fed, Go For It!
Judy Shelton in back in play for a Fed nominee. Please do it President Trump.
Also see Why Trump Won the Election in One Clear Picture
There is massive Democrat soul searching today. Hardly anyone will get it right. This is despite huge evidence all year long.
