A few thoughts:
The main difference: Florida doesn’t have an avalanche of mail ballots on Election Day. The state doesn’t allow mail voters to drop off their ballots anywhere but the county elections office on Tuesday.
Arizona does, and Maricopa County voters took advantage of late voting this year more than ever before. The county received 290,000 mail-in ballots on Election Day, according to County Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, the most ever, and a 70% increase from 2020’s general election. That includes mail-in ballots sent in the mail, or dropped off at a vote center or drop box. The voter signatures on the envelopes of those mail-in ballots take time for county workers to verify. Florida is already done verifying those signatures before Election Day.
- Counting Through Conspiracy Theories in Arizona’s Midterms.
The issues started just a few hours in: voters reported that the tabulators couldn’t read their ballots, first at a handful of polling places around Phoenix, then a few more. Across the country, Election Day tends to involve a certain amount of managed chaos—volunteers don’t show up for their shifts, or can’t figure out how to set up the printers—but these technical issues were cropping up in Maricopa County, which has been the epicenter of election conspiracies for the past two years. The local officials running the election—Bill Gates, the chair of the county board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder—were already under enormous scrutiny. For months, right-wing activists and candidates had been stoking fears that the election might be rigged. The Gateway Pundit predicted “wide-scale, multifaceted voter fraud”; Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said that “Stephen Richer and the entire Maricopa board of supervisors are a team of crooks and charlatans.” A swarm of national and international media were in town to observe how things unfolded. And now the machines weren’t working. By early afternoon, one in three polling places in Maricopa County were having problems with election equipment. “People of Arizona: Don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY. Don’t let it happen!”
- Why is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?
The big picture here is that counts are taking extra time in races that are very close. News networks are hesitant to project winners because the margins between candidates are narrow and there are many ballots left to count – and so the need for patience may be justified. In this cycle, much of the heat is engulfing just three states: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.
The number of people who vote early has increased dramatically since the pandemic. This year Maricopa county also saw a surge in the number of early ballots that were dropped off on election day – they are known as “late earlies” – rising to 290,000, the largest number in the state’s history and 100,000 more than in 2020.
Each early ballot has to be verified to check that the voter’s signature matches the signature in the voter rolls, and after that is done it is sent to a bipartisan panel for approval and processing. That all takes time, as we are witnessing.
Many people have drawn a comparison of Arizona’s vote count with that of Florida, which called its results within hours of polls closing on Tuesday. That state’s system allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots as soon as they are received; mail-in ballots have to be requested and must be received by an election supervisor no later than 7pm on election day.
But the main reason why Ron DeSantis won his re-election race so quickly on Tuesday was because it was a blowout, with the incumbent Republican governor garnering 59% of the vote while his challenger, Charlie Crist, received only 40%.
- Why Does It Take So Long to Count Mail Ballots in Key States? Blame Legislatures.
Far from being a fraud, a conspiracy, or even an accident, the slow count of mail ballots is a deliberate choice that lawmakers in key battleground states have made — and with disastrous consequences for public trust in elections. By building these delays into the system, lawmakers give oxygen to false claims of “ballot dumps” and other nonsense that has been used to sow distrust and has led to threats and violence against election workers. We will hear the same false claims after the 2022 election — in which mail ballots again appear to be tilting Democratic — and in every subsequent election until state legislatures fix the process.
State law prescribes the timing of the vote-counting process. Most states allow election workers to remove ballots from their envelopes and confirm the voter’s eligibility before Election Day, sometimes weeks in advance as the ballots arrive at processing centers. Nearly half of states — including Florida, Ohio, and Texas — allow election officials to scan ballots into tabulators ahead of Election Day so that these ballots can be counted immediately and included in results on election night.
- When polls close — and how long counting votes might take — in each state.
Poll closing times vary from state to state, from county to county, and, in some parts of the country, from town to town. The earliest results in most states are reported by local voting precincts soon after polls close there. Every state also has different rules for how officials process and count ballots, and these rules determine how quickly results are released.
In 2020, an influx of mail-in and early ballots due to the pandemic caused major slowdowns in vote counting and reporting election results. It took four days for enough votes to be counted for the major decision desks to call the presidency for Joe Biden.
- It Took Two Weeks to Call Every State in 2020. This Is When to Expect Results This Year.
This article reflects expectations for results timing by officials before election night. As of Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time, three competitive Senate seats are yet to be called. It’s unclear how long it will take to count remaining mail and provisional ballots in Nevada and Georgia. Georgia seems unlikely to be resolved before a Dec. 6 runoff election.
