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Still Counting Votes in Arizona
Meghan McCain calls it “a national embarrassment.”
It’s “a laughingstock,” according to Arizona Republican state Sen. J. D. Mesnard.
“Our system is broken,” groused Elon Musk.
Progressive Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts says, “You could grow a beard” waiting to find out what happened. “And I’m not just talking about the men.”
What is going on that can unite the Left and the Right in such a rare show of concord?
They’re counting votes in Maricopa County.
The counting in Arizona’s largest and most populous county may go on until Election Day plus 10–13; that is, it’ll take between 10 days and 13 days before all the Maricopa County votes have been tallied.
And that’s fast. In 2012 and 2018 it took 14 days, in 2010 it took 15, in 2008 it took 17.
Another election season, another election fiasco.
Arizona, once a reliable red state in its voting habits, is now reliably red-faced with its vote counting.
The authorities tick off on their fingers justifications for this glacial tally operation with troubling nonchalance. They act like it’s old hat because it is old hat.
The many close races can’t be called, we’re told, until the Maricopa ballots are tabulated, given that the country’s second-largest county (Los Angeles County is the largest) comprises about 62 percent of Arizona’s population. Compounding that, the ballots in Maricopa County this cycle were two pages long — double-sided — with 79 races and referenda, on average. Long ballots take longer to count.
Add to this a curing period, mandated by law, in which voters are given five days to verify that an unclear or otherwise problematic signature is theirs. This pushes back the earliest possible final vote announcement to Election Day plus five.
But the real rub is a state law that mandates that election officials cannot start processing early ballots dropped off at polling stations on Election Day — what they call “late earlies” — until the morning after Election Day. There were 292,000 of these in 2022; this cycle’s number was 225,000, which doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of ballots dropped off late last week and over the weekend.
Four days post-election, on Nov. 8, an estimated half a million ballots still needed to be counted. It was not until Saturday night that the Associated Press called the state for Trump. He won by a six-point spread — 52.6 percent to 46.4 percent. On Monday, six days after Election Day, the AP called the Senate race for Ruben Gallego who won by about two points. One House race is still undecided, with 90 percent of the vote tallied.
Arizona could take a few pointers from Florida. Once the most mockable of all states in vote counting, Florida has turned fiasco into state of the art. It has recovered from the hanging chads and dimpled chads and butterfly ballots of the contested 2000 presidential race that took until December to call to where, in 2024, the state called their results shortly after 8 p.m. on election night.
They do it by cutting off early voting days before Election Day; this year the deadline was Saturday, Nov. 2. All those early ballots have to be counted by 7 p.m. on Election Eve. Thus, once the polls close, they have all mail-in and early votes tallied.
Arizona Republicans passed in 2023 a piece of legislation that would have yielded similar results. Senate Bill 1595 would have moved the deadline for dropping off early ballots from 7 p.m. on Election Day to 7 p.m. on the previous Friday. Voters who dropped off ballots on Election Day would have been required to follow the same requirements as those voting in person — stand in line, show ID, and sign the poll book.
The number of “late earlies” would have dropped considerably, thus reducing the number of ballots to be signature-verified beginning the next day, and streamlining the vote counting immeasurably.
Mesnard, the bill’s sponsor, said it “was commonsense, practical to implement, fair to the voters, and would have made a real difference in tackling the lengthy timeline voters and candidates – and the nation – continue to complain about.”
The bill made it to Gov. Katie Hobbs’s desk, where the “Veto Queen” pounded it with her veto stamp — one of 185 she nixed since taking office in 2022, which breaks the record of 181 by former Gov. Janet Napolitano, who took six years to rack up her many no votes. Explained Hobbs, “This bill fails to meaningfully address the real challenges facing Arizona voters.” A response that could have been written by a machine.
Mesnard’s response to the veto:
Once again, Arizona is a laughingstock across the country for how long it’s taking our state to determine winners and losers in this election, an election with national implications. This chaos, confusion, frustration, and controversy is nothing new for us and easily could have been avoided this year had the Governor not vetoed SB 1595.
According to the Arizona Daily Independent, Warren Petersen, president of the Arizona Senate, promises to introduce, on the first day of the legislative session, a bill that would result in more timely vote counting in the Grand Canyon State.
READ MORE from Tom Raabe:
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The post Still Counting Votes in Arizona appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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