An employee at Runbeck Election Services monitors early ballots being printed at the company’s facility in Phoenix. Photo by Jerod MacDonad-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Voters who want to request an early ballot only have until Oct. 25, and those ballots must be mailed by Oct. 29 to ensure they arrive before the Election Day deadline. But how are those early ballots processed, counted and kept secure — and what can early voting patterns tell us about voter turnout?
Arizona has been at the forefront of early voting and voting by mail with the vast majority of the state choosing to cast their ballots this way. The Arizona legislature shifted from an absentee ballot system, where voters had to cite a hardship for voting by mail, to a no-excuse early voting system in 1991.
By 1997, the word absentee was replaced with “early” by lawmakers at the state Capitol, and in 2007, the state created a Permanent Early Voting List for voters who preferred to vote early and didn’t want to request a mail-in ballot each election.
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While the number of voters and ballot returns vary by cycle, this year the number of people voting in-person at early voting sites is 170% above 2016 and 9% below 2020. For ballots being mailed back, currently Maricopa County is underpacing both 2022 and 2020, according to Maricopa County Recorder spokeswoman Taylor Kinnerup.
“It is truly going to be hard to compare to the previous elections,” Kinnerup said, adding that the two-page ballot, a first since 2006, will likely lead to changes in voter habits and returns.
There are some 13,572 different ballots in Maricopa County, and the average one will include 79 contests, including the presidential race, positions on local school boards, seats in the state legislature as well as judicial retention elections.
As of Oct. 22, there have been 319,837 ballots returned across the state, including 187,882 from Maricopa County voters. Republicans are currently outpacing Democrats by more than 19,000 returned ballots.
However, turnout for Democratic voters is slightly higher than Republican voters with 9.56% of Democratic voters turning out compared to the 9.22% of Republicans. About 4.4% of politically affiliated voters have already voted early.
After you mail your ballot back, teams from Maricopa County then collect the ballots from the United States Postal Service and dropboxes around the county. The ballots are then sent to Runbeck, the company that prints the ballots, in order to be scanned for the signature verification process, as well as marking the returned ballot in the system to prevent double voting.
The physical ballots that a voter marked on are never seen by anyone at Runbeck during this process. The physical ballot and affidavit envelope do not make it to the hands of election workers until the signature on the affidavit envelope is verified.
No election worker physically handles the affidavit envelope or ballot during this process.
If a worker cannot verify the signature, a worker with the elections department reaches out directly to the voter to verify the authenticity of the affidavit envelope sent back.
After all those steps are completed, the ballots — still in their affidavit envelopes — are taken out of the secure vault at the Runbeck facility to make their way to be tabulated. The ballots are then removed from the envelopes to be inspected and confirmed to be from this election before being tabulated.
Bipartisan teams of two ensure that every ballot and affidavit envelope are separated to ensure that the integrity of a voter’s secret ballot remains intact. If the ballot cannot be read or has an overvote — when a ballot has more votes for a race than is allowed — it is sent to adjudication.
If that happens, a bipartisan team evaluates the ballot to determine what the voter’s intent was, and both members of the team have to agree on the decision.
Finally, those tabulated results are then stored on computer servers that are air-gapped, meaning they have no way to connect to the internet. Those computers are inaccessible except to the highest ranked non-elected election officials until Election Day. These early ballots will be the first set of results released on election night.
If you plan to vote early, you can learn exactly what is on your ballot on the county website and it can also help educate voters who anticipate voting on Election Day. Voters who want to ensure they are on the early mailing list, check their voting registration or request a mail-in ballot can do so at BeBallotReady.Vote.
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