Election workers sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Nov. 9, 2022. Photo by John Moore | Getty Images
The pernicious claim that delayed election results are a sign of fraud only dates back to 2020, but neither Arizona nor Maricopa County have ever reported final results on election night.
Over the past 16 years, Maricopa County has reported complete results an average of 13 days after the election, with its quickest turn around at eight days in 2014 and its longest at 17 days in 2008.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told CBS News last week that he expected results to be reported along the same timeline as usual in the state, between 10 and 13 days after the election.
Results aren’t considered official until they’ve been certified by each county’s supervisors, which must happen within 20 days after the election. After that, the secretary of state finalizes the statewide election canvass on the fourth Monday following the election.
There are many reasons that Arizona’s results take so long to be reported — longer than other states with different laws — and that determining winners doesn’t happen as quickly as happened in the past.
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Elections in the United States are decentralized, and are run by counties in most states, meaning that a national election is really about 3,200 local elections. And every state determines when ballots can be counted, how long voters have to fix any issues with their ballot and whether mail-in ballots can be counted if they’re postmarked by Election Day, in addition to many other rules and regulations.
Because these rules vary so much from state to state, some can deliver unofficial election night results — and, later, official results — much more quickly than others.
Generally, media organizations that unofficially “call” races on election night for one candidate or another take pre-election polling into account, and won’t make a call if polls were extremely tight because they don’t want to have to take back their prediction, Michael Morley, director of Florida State University’s Center for Election Law, told the Arizona Mirror.
It’s much easier for media organizations to make those calls in states or counties where an overwhelming majority of voters are registered with one political party, or where polling has indicated a blowout. But for states like Arizona, which in the past was solidly red but has become a purple battleground state, it takes more time to determine who won.
The media organizations use complicated algorithms worked out well before the election to determine whether they can make a call without having to worry about later retracting it. Factored into those decisions are things like the percentage of votes already counted in a given race, which candidate those voters favored and how close the outcome is expected to be.
For many races in Arizona this year, including for president and several of the state legislature’s more competitive districts, margins are expected to be razor-thin. Coupled with the state’s somewhat even spread of voter registrations with 36% registered as Republicans, 29% as Democrats and almost 34% as independents, it’s difficult to accurately call races on election night.
Official election results from states and counties are never reported on election night, in any state. Results that are released by counties and states after the polls close on Election Day are preliminary and incomplete, and they always have been. Arizona and Maricopa County will begin sharing preliminary results, which will include all early ballots cast prior to Election Day, at 8 p.m. on election night.
After that, ballots cast in polling places on Election Day — which are tallied immediately when a voter places her ballot in the on-site tabulator — will be added to the total. But that takes time, as the tabulators must be loaded onto secured trucks and driven to the county’s election headquarters, where their data cards are downloaded into the system and verified.
Finally, early ballots that arrived on Election Day or were dropped off at polling sites are verified and counted.
Reporting official results takes more time. Votes have to be counted, but counties also must complete processes designed to ensure election integrity and accuracy, including a review of ballot chain of custody records, tabulator machine testing and hand-count audits performed by the political parties that must match up with results from the tabulators. That all has to happen before the vote totals are certified.
Additionally, voters who submitted provisional ballots on Election Day — for example if poll workers told them they weren’t registered but they know that they are — have until five days after the election to provide proof to the county that they are a registered voter and “cure” the ballot. In the meantime, election officials don’t know how many of those ballots will be cured to be added to the totals.
The same goes for voters whose signatures on early ballot envelopes were flagged as inconsistent with past signatures. They’ll also have until Nov. 10 this year to cure their signature, or any other issues with their ballot.
A new law implemented in Arizona this year requires the number of early ballots dropped off at a polling location on Election Day to be counted before poll workers can deliver the ballots to a central counting facility to be signatured-verified and tabulated.
The change, backed by legislative Republicans, some of whom have also complained about the time it takes to deliver final results, is expected to delay those results.
Additionally, in Maricopa County, where nearly 60% of Arizona’s registered voters live, a lengthy doubled-sided, two-page ballot has already caused some minor delays and could mean longer lines for those who vote in person on Election Day.
“Having two pages to scan compared to a single page, that doubles the scanning time,” Morley said. “That can very easily add up.”
And other issues can arise with a two-page ballot, since election workers have to make sure both pages stay together throughout processing and tabulation and mistakes could occur if, for example, a husband and wife mix up the pages of their ballots before returning them, he added.
Because around 2.5 million of Arizona’s 4.3 million registered voters live in Maricopa County, delays in the county could hold up results for the entire state.
Where it started
The myth that longer ballot counting time increases the likelihood of fraud dates back to the 2020 election, when there was a huge spike in mail-in ballots spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Particularly, what’s taken hold is the sentiment that, if we don’t get election results on election night, something’s wrong,” Nora Benavidez, spokesperson for the nonprofit organization Free Press, told the Mirror. “That’s the furthest thing from the truth. Election officials are doing their best under intense scrutiny.”
Wait times for unofficial results released on election night increased significantly in many states in 2020 because their systems weren’t prepared to deal with so many mail-in ballots. Spurred on by former President Donald Trump’s insistence, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him, false claims that nefarious actors intentionally delayed the results to allow time to manipulate them thrived.
In Arizona, which has allowed no-excuse early voting by mail since the early 1990s, the issue that slows down counting the most is large numbers of early mail-in ballots being dropped off on Election Day.
When early ballots are actually returned early, they can be processed, have signatures verified and be tabulated prior to Election Day. But the so-called “late earlies” that are dropped off on Election Day can’t be processed until the polls close. That means they have to be counted, organized, signature verified and the envelope scanned to ensure that the voter hasn’t already returned a ballot, all before they can be tabulated.
That process takes time.
And if more people return late earlies, the process takes even longer. The number of “late earlies” spiked in 2022 to more than 290,000 in Maricopa County, almost 20% of the votes cast in the county during that election. Comparatively, in the 2020 election, late earlies only made up 8% of votes cast in Maricopa County.
This year, more than 400,000 late earlies could be dropped off on Election Day in Maricopa County, another significant increase from two years ago.
If the trend in late early ballots continues this year, it could contribute to longer wait times for official results. But that wait time is an indication that election workers are following the law, Benavidez said.
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