Arizona elections officials expect fast, but not instant, vote tally

PHOENIX — The top elections official in Arizona’s largest county said votes will be counted this week faster than in previous years, but plenty of ballots won’t be tabulated until after Election Day.

Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show on Tuesday morning his office expects to receive nearly 200,000 early ballots on Election Day, and those will be signature verified, processed and fed into tabulation machines in the coming days.

“Our final, final numbers are not going to be had today,” Fontes said. “It’s never happened, and it never will.

“We will get it right. We will do it carefully. And it will take several days for us to have an official number.”

Fontes said a big batch of early ballot tabulations will be released at 8 p.m., an hour after the polls close, and the results from Tuesday’s live voting will be reported in chunks over the course of the evening.

“We’ll have a good idea probably by midnight of where we are, but … we’re still going to have several hundred thousand ballots that came in late that we are processing.”

Because counties were allowed to start counting early ballots two weeks before the election, one week sooner than in previous years, Fontes says Arizona will have a relatively manageable backlog.

“We’re going to have far more votes reported out every single day after Election Day than we have in the past,” he said. “That means the last day that we put numbers out is going to be much sooner.”

In the 2018 midterm election, it took six days of post-election counting before The Associated Press called Kyrsten Sinema the winner over Martha McSally in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Tuesday she expects enough votes to be counted across the state for some races to be called before the night is up — without speculating about which ones.

“We’ll have a good amount of results tonight, and [for] races that aren’t close, the folks that are in the business of calling races will probably be able to do so,” she told KTAR News’ Arizona Morning News.

“We’ll see the early ballots that have already been tabulated as well as the Election Day results tonight.”

Tune to KTAR News 92.3 FM, online or our app on election night for coverage and analysis of the national, state and local results as they come in.

Follow @kstonezone