Maricopa County, Arizona, election officials asked voters to be patient with them, saying on Tuesday that it could take nearly two weeks to “complete tabulation of all the ballots that come in.”
As of this week, around 400,000 voters in Maricopa County have voted early of the estimated 2.1 million people in the county expected to cast a ballot in the 2024 election, 12 News reported. The county’s election officials said that the length of this year’s ballot, combined with what’s expected to be a large turnout, will slow down the count. In Maricopa County, ballots are two pages long with an average of 79 contests per ballot.
“We do expect that it will take between 10 and 13 days to complete tabulation of all of the ballots that come in, but we ask for the community’s patience,” Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer said. “We want to make sure that this is a secure process, but we also want to make sure that it is an accurate process.”
Social media users, including X owner Elon Musk, blasted the county on Wednesday. Musk wrote in response to the 12 News report, “Our system is broken.”
Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates shot back at Musk, writing, “Our system isn’t broken. @maricopacounty is counting ballots faster than ever and on pace with every other state. Arizona law requires processes that dictate the timing by which we count the ballots. More importantly: I’ll take accuracy and security over speed every time.”
Maricopa County, which is the largest county in the battleground state, was at the center of controversy in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections. In 2020, Republicans raised voter integrity concerns in Maricopa County, and two years later, tabulators in around 70 of the county’s 223 voting centers had issues reading ballots. President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by just over 2 percentage points in 2020 in Maricopa County after Trump won the county by around 3 percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Republicans sued in 2020 in an attempt to force Maricopa County to reinspect ballots by hand, but that challenge was dismissed by a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge, the Arizona Republic reported.
Assistant Maricopa County Manager Zach Schira said that voting early in the 2024 election, either in person or by mail, would help officials “report more results on election night.”
“If I have one message for voters here today, it is this: that the longer ballots and higher interest in this 2024 general election will create longer lines on Election Day, and that’s okay,” Schira said. “But if you want to save time and you want to avoid those lines vote early, either in person or by mail, that’ll save you time, and it’ll help us report more results on election night.”
Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett said that officials expect voter turnout to “start approaching very close to those 2020 numbers.”
“We are seeing a little bit of a lag of where we were in 2020 but the last few days we’ve actually seen an uptick in turnout,” he added.
In Michigan, another battleground state, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said earlier this week that election results likely won’t be known until the “end of the day on Wednesday.”
“With that said, we will always prioritize accuracy and security over efficiency,” Benson added. “Understanding how much people will want those results, we’re still going to make sure the process is secure and accurate before we put anything out to the public.”
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