US election results may not be known immediately, key Arizona county could be the reason

Inside a small building surrounded by a chain-link fence and concrete barriers in downtown Phoenix, election workers on Nov. 5 will begin a slow recount of every ballot cast in Maricopa County, Arizona.

In what has become the country’s quintessential key town, the recount here could determine whether Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump will win the Presidency of the United States. It is also likely to determine the winner of a closely contested race that could decide which party controls the Senate.

Arizona is one of the most important battlegrounds in the country. That means voters, campaigns and people around the world must sometimes wait more than a week to find out who won the county and, with it, state races in the key state of Arizona. This year, election officials warn it could take up to 13 days to tabulate all ballots in Maricopa.

The prolonged recount has turned the county into a center of election conspiracy theories generated by Trump and a key part of the former president’s campaign to install those who supported the reversal of the last election in 2020 in positions that oversee these elections.

Why is the recount taking so long in Maricopa?

The reason ballot counting takes so long is simple. With its 4.5 million residents, Maricopa has a population larger than nearly half of the states in the country and is home to 60% of Arizona voters. Poll workers must follow election laws, passed by Republican-controlled legislatures, that slow down the count. And it is one of the few counties in the US that is so politically divided that the races are usually close.

That has made the county “the center of everything,” according to Joe Garcia, leader of the Latino activist group Chicanos Por La Causa, noting that it is Arizona’s largest population center and home to the state capital.

“So the power structure, the money and the growth are all here in Maricopa County,” he said. “If you can win Maricopa County, you’ll probably win the entire state of Arizona.”

Maricopa’s position is not only at the center of Arizona politics. The county has been a frequent stop for presidential candidates seeking Arizona’s 11 electoral votes (including Trump and Harris and their campaigns this year) and is a fulcrum on which close races that could determine control pivot. of the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States.

The rapidly growing county has also become home to a set of key demographics in the battle for the White House. Maricopa is home to a growing Latino population, retirees, newly arrived younger voters, and a broad, deep conservative population that struggles with a key dissident group: wealthier, college-educated Republicans who have become disillusioned with the party’s turn under the administration. of Trump.

Denials and conspiracies

Trump’s baseless claim that he had won Arizona turned Maricopa County into one of the country’s hotbeds of election denialism and conspiracy theories.

After the 2020 election, Trump supporters showed up outside the county elections office, some armed and many waving Trump and American flags, for a “Stop the Steal” rally. His then-lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, held hearings at a Phoenix hotel.

The Republican-controlled state Senate launched an error-ridden review of Maricopa’s handling of the 2020 election, which included inspecting ballots for signs of fibers showing they had been secretly manufactured in China. The county became something of a tourist attraction for election deniers who came from other states to see the spectacle.

County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who defended the accuracy of the county’s election results, was criticized by Trump himself, and Richer and his family faced threats.

In 2022, Republicans who allied with Trump against Richer and the county supervisors ran for top state offices, and they all lost. Losing gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake made so many claims about the election being stolen and accusations against Richer that she sued her fellow Republican for defamation. Lake is running for Senate this year against Democratic Rep. Rubén Gallego.

Richer says the reason some Republicans remain skeptical about the way elections work in the county is not because there is anything especially complicated or unusual about how votes are counted. It’s because Maricopa, located in a state that was once reliably Republican and where Biden in 2020 defeated Trump by a margin of about 11,000 votes, may be the best place to undermine confidence in the national election.

Part of what fuels conspiracy theories is utter disbelief that Maricopa, a national magnet for conservatives for decades, could turn Democratic.

Many in Maricopa are well aware that they live on the partisan knife edge, closely balanced between the two sides.

Why a full count takes time

Conspiracy theory followers have taken advantage of the way Maricopa reports its vote counts after Election Day in a burst and then gradually over more than a week when it finally becomes clear who won. There are three main reasons for this: the size of Maricopa, the closeness of the county races, and Arizona’s election laws, which were written and passed by Republicans.

Maricopa is the second largest electoral jurisdiction in the country. Only historically Democratic Los Angeles County is larger.

Maricopa reports its results much faster than Los Angeles, but it takes longer to figure out who won Maricopa, creating a false impression of disorder in the vote count there.

The reason Maricopa is taking longer is because Maricopa, and Arizona in general, is so divided today that a few thousand votes make a difference. Therefore, news organizations have to wait until virtually the last ballot is counted before declaring a winner.

In 2022, a Democrat won the state attorney general race by 280 votes. In less competitive places, from Florida to California, the winner is often clear within minutes of polls closing because the tens of thousands of outstanding ballots would not be enough to close the gap.

In this election, voters are casting an extra-long, two-page ballot that takes longer to tabulate, so it could take up to 13 days before they finish counting, said Deputy Director of Elections Jennifer Liewer.

The timeline is similar to the number of days it took in recent elections to complete the recount. An Associated Press investigation found that it took Maricopa County 13 days to finish counting in the 2018 general election, 11 days in 2020 and 13 days in the 2022 midterm elections.

Arizona’s vote-by-mail law also prolongs the count. It allows voters to mail ballots before polls close on Election Day. In 2022, about 293,000 voters, about one-fifth of the total vote in Maricopa, returned their ballots by mail on Election Day.

Counting mail-in ballots takes longer because before they can be counted, envelopes must be scanned, ballots sorted and voter signatures examined to ensure they are legitimate. Some states, like Florida, require that all mail-in ballots be delivered by Election Day, so this process ends when the polls close. Because of Arizona law, when Maricopa polls close, it’s just getting started.

Extending the recount further is a provision of Arizona law that allows voters to “correct” their ballots up to five days after Election Day. That means if the elections office believes the signature on the ballot or some other technical detail is incorrect, the voter has five more days to come and correct it for the ballot to count.

Typically, the number of corrected ballots is relatively small, but in elections where every vote is essential to determining the winner, the correction process prolongs the suspense even further.

County Recorder Stephen Richer noted that while these processes may seem overly complex to some people in the United States, they are things that Western states like Arizona have been doing for a century or more. Voting by mail dates back to the 19th century in the region.

“We vote differently than most people in the eastern United States,” Richer said.

[Con información de The Associated Press]

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