Arizona, bringing up the rear
What on earth is wrong with Arizona? Why does it take what seems like years for a state with a moderate-sized population to count its ballots? There are only about 7.4 million people in the entire state of Arizona. That makes it smaller than New York City. And yet Arizona lumbers on, and we still don’t even know for sure who its senator will be, Gallego or Lake, although Gallego has been consistently in the lead. Luckily, the presidential race is already decided and Arizona isn’t needed.
But what gives? (the article is from yesterday):
It’s taking far longer than expected in multiple counties across Arizona to count ballots and report election results.
The delay means numerous congressional, statewide, and local races have yet to be called, including a U.S. Senate contest and races that would help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House. Voter advocates are warning that voters won’t have enough time to fix any problems with their ballots if the counting goes on too long. …
The long, two-page ballot that many counties had in this election was to blame for delays in at least some instances. For example, in Maricopa County and Pima County, it’s taking longer to remove mail ballots from their envelopes and unfold and inspect them.
In other counties, the problems vary. Cochise County is experiencing a mechanical problem with its tabulators that’s causing them to operate slowly …
In both Yavapai and Pinal counties, tabulating polling place results from Election Day took much longer than expected because of unclear voter marks that had to be sorted out before results from the polling place could be reported. …
Yuma County still had 40% of its ballots to count as of Thursday night, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. It’s unclear why. …
A coalition of dozens of voting rights groups are concerned that, because of the delays, voters will not have enough time to respond to counties that flagged a mismatched or missing signature on their mail ballots. Under state law, the deadline for fixing those issues is Sunday, while counties had not yet reviewed hundreds of thousands of voter signatures on ballots across the state as of Thursday night.
Whatever is going on – and it appears to be plenty – it undermines the already low trust in the integrity of the election process in the state.
Here’s an article that appeared today:
In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.
Indeed. It’s a very good thing that the presidency is no longer in doubt, even without Arizona. But there is that Senate seat, and those House seats. The latter in particular could be highly important.
Also:
In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.
So it’s still up in the air. More [my emphasis]:
The delay in reporting the races falls largely on Maricopa county, the fourth largest in the US, where the state capital, Phoenix, lies. The county on Friday evening reported 351,000 ballots yet to count. Some have not been through the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope. Officials expected ballot counting would continue for 10 to 13 days after election day.
There is no excuse for this – none. But here are the excuses offered:
The long process for counting ballots is in part explained by the lengthy two-page ballot itself with election workers taking nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat and check for damage, according to Votebeat.
In Cochise county, a mechanical problem with tabulators caused them to work more slowly.
According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, part of the state’s problem is “early-late” votes – early voting ballot papers that were filled in don’t get dropped off to be counted until election day itself.
“We have a substantial number of voters who take their early ballot and they kind of keep it on their kitchen counter for, like, three weeks,” state representative Alexander Kolodin told AZ Central.
Kolodin, a Republican, is considering a proposal that would require early ballots to be returned in advance of election day, giving time for election officials to go through the process of verification.
Ya think?
It’s almost as though Arizona wants to be in this position. And people can be forgiven for being very very suspicious.
One would be tempted to think this security ballot would be the toughest in the country but suspect a county with almost no trust in the rest of the country. And it’s not Arizona that can’t count ballots in a week it’s individual counties that can’t count as fast as a state like Florida.
Don’t know why but have word Lake might pull it out yet.
Heh —
Daniel Horowitz:
Casey DeSantis:
https://x.com/CaseyDeSantis/status/1855034833430626680
When in doubt the simplest and most correct reason is cheating by the Democrats.
I believe Florida officials have offered to work with Arizonans to explain their election procedures. Florida went from horrible (remember 2000) to top-notch. There are no valid reasons for this mess. Reasons which are not valid are incompetence and deliberate action to enable fraud.
We had a long two-sided ballot in NC. Tabulators handled them perfectly.
“It’s almost as though Arizona wants to be in this position.”
Almost?
The more time to ‘count’ votes after the polls have closed, the more time to ‘discover’ the ‘missing’ votes that provide the ‘victory’.
I remember reading about the 2018 election in my home state of Arizona. In what was otherwise a good year for Republicans, I noted that they elected the Democrat, Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State. I knew at the time this was trouble. Later I found out that Hobbs was funded by and a follower of George Soros. See this article
Katie Hobbs Sat on Board of Radical Far-Left, Soros-Funded Leadership Group
https://tennesseestar.com/the-west/arizona/katie-hobbs-sat-on-board-of-radical-far-left-soros-funded-leadership-group/pdabrosca/2022/08/02/
In 2022, Hobbs used her position with help from turncoat Republicans like Maricopa county supervisor Bill Gates and State Senator Paul Boyer to elect herself as governor along with Democrats as secretary of state and attorney general. The Republican governor Doug Ducey just stood by and did nothing.
The election system they implemented in Arizona is close to the California system. California is even more grotesque and will not deliver final results until December 13. On the day after election day, California still had 10 million ballots to count.
Eight states and Washington, D.C., allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington state. Notice that except for Utah, these are heavily Democrat controlled states
I have not checked whether the final results are available in the other Democrat states, but since they are so heavily democrat, it is easier to predict the final results. The Democrats have not been able to complete their flipping of Arizona so it is still a swing state and there are more close elections.
Here in CO you can go in and vote in person.
I just saw blurb that some election officials have been caught altering ballot counts. At one time the Justice Dept would step in an file lawsuits, but it is no longer a “Justice” dept.
SHIREHOME,
Would you please provide a reference for officials altering ballots? Thank you.
There is an equally ridiculous, or worse, situation in California Congressional District 41.
As of Saturday, no closure.
This district is contained within one county; it is not a geographically difficult area to access.
The incumbent, who is a Republican, has had a 3 point lead for days; but it is too close to call.
Today, Saturday, there was an announcement that they had to shutdown due to a bomb threat. No word on what went on Wednesday through Friday.
There are several undecided Congressional races in California. I noted that most, if not all, were led by Republicans.
If one were a conspiracy theorist, one might think that the count will go on until the leads evaporate. One might also wonder where the RNC legal team is, given that every House race is critical at this point.
Oldflyer, California and many other states allow something called ballot curing. This is where if something is wrong with a ballot, the voter can be contacted to fix it. In California, the Democrats have sophisticated operations to do this usually manned by union members. If anyone here wants to do something to help the Republican house races, send some money to reformcalifornia.org. They are contacting Republican voters in the districts with close races with problems in their ballots for ballot curing.
Lake has lost.
And it turns out that California has until mid-December to decide whom it wants to win its Congressional elections.
I guess this might be called the Democratic Party’s PLAN B.
(IOW, they may not have been able to drag Harris across the finish line but all systems are GO in their efforts to hog-tie Trump once again.)
I was an election judge for 30 years in Minnesota, moved to AZ three years ago. As near as I can tell, there’s no cheating in the counting process. As with other states with mailed ballots, the way to cheat here is by ballot harvesting. That’s untraceable.
First, Arizonans like to have a ballot mailed to them, and they like to let it age and cure properly before returning it. But when it is returned, there’s a signature on the outside that has to be matched to one on file. That is done by humans, and it takes time.
That bit about oh, two long two-sided ballots being hard, no, that ain’t it. Once the signature is verified, they can be fed in upside down, backwards, any way you like. The tabulator will reject a ballot with errors. It’s not like the workers have to scrutinize each one before feeding it.
Arizonans vote for EVERYTHING. School board, community college board, state college board, mine inspector, ag inspector, library board, county commission, water board, water conservation board, constable, justice of the peace and more! Each has their own boundary lines, as of course do legislators and congressfolk.
The net result is that Maricopa county has 2000 different ballot configurations. Rather than have 2000 voting locations, they have 200 and you can vote at any of them. Your ballot is printed on the spot. This was an issue in Maricopa in 2022. But that’s how it works.
So you have early voters in person. Easy peasy, they’re done and gone. Many, many voters get mailed ballots. This is more carefully administered than in CA or Oregon. The voter can mail back the ballot, or drop it off at any voting center. Or, the voter can keep the ballot and just vote in person on Election Day.
The problem comes when voters return their mailed ballots on or just before Election Day. These are held until polls close. Next day they start processing these. If folks would just drop mailed ballots off earlier, much less delays. But they don’t.
County Recorder Stephen Richer is a prick. A Republican prick. The SoState is a Democrat Soros prick. He whines that the legislature won’t give him more money.
The legislature, run by Republicans, created this system. There was a bill to improve it this year but Dem Gov Soros creature Hobbs vetoed it.
All that said, it looks to me like the system is working as designed, and it ain’t like they didn’t warn us. They did.
Why did Kari Lake run 5 points behind Trump? Two years ago she insulted the McCainiacs, and they don’t forgive. The Scottsdale (wealthy) Abortion Moms don’t like her either. Some of them liked Kamala even less, so Trump got votes there.
Kari Lake carried the rest of the state 60-40, except for Tucson. If she’d just split Maricopa 50-50 she’d have won.
One oddity: Trump carried Native Americans 65-35. I’m trying to figure that out. In 2022 the Dems ran a big expensive vote harvesting operation on the reservations . But not this year, it seems.
Oh–Maricopa County = Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, Tempe and more. 65 percent of Arizonans live in Maricopa County.
Thanks for that.
It is certainly encouraging.
What’s your view, though, on the 2022 elections and all those voting machines that broke down—presumably due to the wrong-sized voting forms?—in Maricopa county together with the decision afterward not to do anything about those much more than a dozen or two “lost” votes?
Barry,
Officials will do the minimum to get by. I think they knew they screwed up, but there wasn’t any practical way to undo it. No doubt some voters didn’t get to vote. Did it affect races? Almost surely; the AG race came down to 200 votes. Did affect the other big name races? Probably, but the Dem ground game was likely the bigger factor. IMHO, of course.
This time there was a similar but not identical problem in Navajo County, but that affected a few thousand voters, and they had a process to accept the ballots, fix the tabulators, then run the ballots through, rather than tell the voter to come back later.
Barry Meiselin : Lake has lost.
That is incorrect.
You might want to broaden your sources, or at least clearly flag your opinion as your opinion. Did you mean they were going to steal it again?
The Senate vote has NOT been called as of 1:31 pm eastern time Sunday.
Lake has NOT lost.
per NYT–Keri is ahead at 1:38pm eastern
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-arizona-us-senate.html
She has decreased her deficit with every drop all week long, and is expected to continue to do so, as the majority of votes pending are Day Of drop off ballots, which traditionally trend R.
In addition, if there is less than a 1.5% difference , a recount is automatically triggered.
Thanks for that.
Hope, certainly, that you’re right and I’m wrong.
The source was the NY Post.
Looked for that article now and can’t find it.
Found it:
“Democrat Ruben Gallego defeats Republican Kari Lake, wins Arizona Senate race: Decision Desk“—
https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/gallego-defeats-lake-in-arizona-senate-bid/
Once again, hope you’re right.
The Republicans flipped CO8. Evans defeats Caraveo.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/11/10/gabe-evans-beats-yadira-caraveo-colorado/
This may be 217
At the recording of this video Lake is down by 33,000 with 14% of the ballots left to count. If the ballots fall in the same proportion as what has been counted, Lake will likely lose by 50,000.
The forecaster of this video calculates that the precincts left to count could favor Lake and thinks it’s possible she could make up the 33,000 she is down at this point.
KARI LAKE IS VERY MUCH STILL IN THIS FIGHT IN THE ARIZONA SENATE SEAT…(SHE CAN WIN)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjAEWtCmz8w
Seems in Pennsylvania they are going to drag out counting until Casey can win, it doesn’t appear to be finished either.