Why ballot counting is slower than usual this year

Nearly one week after Election Day, the center of U.S. politics is arguably a tabulation location in downtown Phoenix surrounded by police cars, TV crews, and rows and rows of fencing.

After days of incremental ballot tallies, Democrats over the weekend clinched their hold on the U.S. Senate, with news organizations projecting that incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona had won. And in Nevada, they declared that Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto had defeated her Republican opponent.

As of this writing, poll workers here were still counting votes to determine the winner of the close Arizona governor’s race, as well as two still-uncalled U.S. House seats. Control of the House remains undecided, although trends in Arizona and in neighboring California, which has 11 uncalled races, suggest Republicans are on track to wind up with a slim majority. 

The delay has led many Republicans and Democrats alike to ask: What’s taking these Western states so long?

Arizona election officials point first and foremost to Maricopa County’s sheer size, as the fourth most populous county in the nation and its second-largest voting jurisdiction. The state’s long-standing propensity for absentee voting, which has been allowed without exceptions here for 30 years, also requires more verification on the back end. Indeed, they note that Maricopa has always been slow, averaging 12.5 days to post its final election results over the past eight elections. The prolonged count is only getting attention now because the races have been so close and the outcomes so critical. 

But this year’s delay was also compounded by a new factor: suspicions surrounding voting machines and ballots sent through the mail. With portions of the Republican Party propagating unfounded fraud claims and conspiracies after the 2020 election, many “hardcore Republican voters,” as GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake put it, “brought their [mail-in] ballot in on Election Day.” Election officials say the resulting spike in late drop-offs of early ballots, or “late earlies” as they call them, slowed the counting down significantly.

Ironically, the postponed results could fuel even more distrust among these same voters, potentially creating an opening for new conspiracy theories.

“Never in American history has any state ever counted all ballots on Election Day. It’s not possible – and nor do you want it to be,” says David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“But the amount of time that it takes to count ballots can be exacerbated,” he adds – particularly if campaigns actively encourage voters to wait until Election Day to vote while also eschewing machines, an approach Mr. Becker calls “baffling” and likely to create a “vicious cycle” of election fraud claims. 

Hand-delivered on Election Day

Headed into the 2022 midterms, many Americans were concerned that the country would diverge into post-election chaos. But so far, most of the Republican candidates who questioned the 2020 election have not challenged this year’s results.

A rise in split-ticket voting may have helped in that regard. In Nevada, for example, the fact that the GOP captured the governorship may have made it harder for Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt – who tried to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in that state – to dispute his loss to Senator Cortez Masto.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Mr. Becker. “But we’re not out of the woods yet.”

In Arizona, Ms. Lake reiterated in several Fox News appearances this week that she is confident that she will win her race, even though analysts downgraded her chances of victory. While she has not called the results fraudulent, she has characterized her state’s handling of the election as a “laughingstock” and accused Maricopa’s election officials of deliberately waiting to count votes from Republican areas last. Bill Gates, the Republican chair of the county board of supervisors, called that claim “unfair,” explaining that Maricopa counts votes in the order they are received. 

In 2020, Maricopa had about 170,000 “late earlies” dropped off on Election Day. This year, the number was roughly 290,000. The county began tabulating those votes on Friday.

A similar dynamic caused the delay in Nevada’s tabulation. After expanding absentee voting in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nevada Legislature passed a law in 2021 requiring every county clerk to send all active, registered voters a mail-in ballot before Election Day. In 2018, the last set of midterm elections, less than 10% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail or absentee. This year, more than half of them did.

Officials in California chalk up much of their delay to state-specific codes, such as a law that allows election departments to continue receiving any ballots that were postmarked by Election Day, for up to a week.

Sarah Ramsey, who runs the Pima County Republican Party’s Election Integrity Program in Arizona, trained hundreds of local Republicans to work as poll watchers and workers this year. She also ran a vote center in Pima County on Election Day, where she had 515 people vote in person and 370 people drop off mail-in ballots that day. 

“Some people got the message that voting on Election Day meant dropping off your [mail-in] ballot on Election Day,” says Ms. Ramsey. She explains the additional labor that’s required to count mail-in ballots. After they are processed through a machine that can open envelopes, a poll worker must compare the signature on the affidavit to the signature on the voter’s registration record.

It’s a process that those who work elections say has only gotten more difficult as Americans type more and handwrite less. 

“Most kids don’t even learn cursive now,” says Helen Purcell, who previously served as Maricopa County recorder for almost three decades. 

Allegations of “something nefarious” 

During an interview at a Phoenix coffee shop, a customer overhears Ms. Purcell talking about ballot “curing” (the process whereby voters can fix or verify something on their ballot) and interrupts to ask the former elections official a question. The woman says Maricopa County recently called her to say her signatures don’t match and that she would have to come in and confirm her identity. After Ms. Purcell explains how she can make sure her ballot gets counted, the woman thanks her and leaves the shop. 

“There’s so much that goes into an election that people just don’t realize,” says Ms. Purcell. 

A Republican, Ms. Purcell says she’s “not happy” with her party right now. She recently attended a local Republican women’s lunch and found herself explaining to fellow attendees how elections work and how rare instances of fraud actually are. She gets particularly frustrated hearing false claims about the glitch that occurred here on Election Day, when vote tabulators were unable to read ballots for several hours at about 30% of Maricopa’s vote centers. 

Election officials have since confirmed the problem was a result of the toner on the ballot printers not being dark enough. Affected voters were able to deposit their ballot in a drop box to be tallied later by a bipartisan team – a batch of roughly 17,000 ballots that has been referred to as “Box 3.”

Mr. Gates, one of Maricopa’s two top election officials, has tried to reassure the public in daily press conferences that the incident was an honest mistake. But in a county that was a primary focus of the Trump campaign’s election fraud claims in 2020, conspiracy theories abound.

“I’m sitting here right now answering emails [alleging that] something nefarious is going on with the tabulation,” says Shelley Kais, chair of the Pima County Republican Party in Arizona. “They’ve already gone from ‘It’s taking too long’ [to] ‘There’s fraud.’”

Ms. Kais emphasizes that she does not think there was any fraud. But going forward, she and other Republican officials agree, the GOP probably needs to rethink its messaging around voting.

Some suggest they also might want to change the laws. Many observers have been comparing Arizona’s process unfavorably to that of Florida, a populous state with plenty of mail-in voting that was able to determine its election results on Election Day. Florida closes its early voting the weekend before Election Day, and officials there are allowed to start tabulating the early ballots as soon as they come in. 

“We’ve already got a bill drafted that you have to drop off ballots by Friday 5 p.m. before [Election Day],” says Gina Swoboda, vice chair of the Arizona Republican Party and “election integrity” coordinator for the Lake campaign.