re:Arizona on my Mind

Bedford TX

Description

It's great fun generating conspiracy theory and having Maga folks eat it up... Or you can just do some very simple searches on the web.... Arizona is generally a Republican run state. The Republicans made the current voting rules. One factor in the speed of counting is the sheer size of Maricopa County, which is the nation's second largest voting jurisdiction. For this election, 1.3 million ballots were cast in the county, and 290,000 early ballots were dropped off on Election Day. The early ballots that came in on Election Day itself are known in some places as "late earlies," the counting of which has been known to hold up tabulation. Another factor is the ballot verification process. "When people are told to drop off their early ballot on Election Day, those can't be counted that night. You can't just run them through a machine. They have to be signature checked, scanned first, then processed by a bipartisan board before they can be counted," said former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell. Purcell said there has been a massive increase in the number of early ballots cast. Currently, workers are counting ballots that came in over the weekend before Election Day, and on the Monday before Election Day. "You can't have it instantaneous unless we had a race where we had 60% and 20%," said Helen Purcell. According to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, 100,000 more "late earlies" were dropped off this Election Day than in 2020. It's the highest number of early ballots turned in on Election Day in the county's history. A total of 1.9 million ballots have already been tabulated in Arizona, but there are still more than 619,000 ballots left to count statewide as of Nov. 10. Protracted vote counts have for years been a staple of elections in Arizona, where the overwhelming majority of votes are cast by mail and many people wait until the last minute to return them. But as Arizona has morphed from a GOP stronghold to a competitive battleground, the delays have increasingly become a source of national anxiety for partisans on both sides. Richer himself has noted that this might spark up a policy debate about the benefits of dropping off early ballots right up to Election Night versus the value of getting immediate answers about election results. It doesn't really matter if it takes 2 days or 10 days. "They have to be signature checked, scanned first, then processed by a bipartisan board before they can be counted," said former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell." They are doing a detailed job of counting votes. They will be done, when they are done.