Arizona’s Election Administration Is An International Embarrassment

Two days have passed since polls closed in Arizona and unsurprisingly, election officials in the state have failed to provide voters with the final results of numerous highly contested races.

As of this article’s publication, none of Arizona’s contested statewide races have been called for any of their respective candidates. With 70 percent of votes tabulated, Democrat Katie Hobbs leads her Republican rival Kari Lake in the gubernatorial race by fewer than 13,000 votes, while Democrat Mark Kelly leads Republican Blake Masters by a little less than 95,000. The races for Arizona attorney general and secretary of state also remain up in the air, with both still too close to call.

According to the Associated Press, there are approximately 600,000 ballots — roughly a quarter of all those cast — that have yet to be tabulated as of Thursday afternoon, with a large segment of these votes coming from the state’s most populous county, Maricopa. On Wednesday morning, Maricopa officials estimated that there are “more than 400K ballots left to count,” with the locality receiving “275K early ballots on Election Day.”

•We have ~86K early ballots processed from late last week and ready to tabulate
•We have ~50K early ballots dropped off Monday & 17K from secure slots (box 3) on Election Day that need to be processed

~1.1 million ballots already reported. New batch of results tonight 2/2

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) November 9, 2022

The chairman of Maricopa’s Board of Supervisors Bill Gates has since told a CNN reporter on Thursday that the county doesn’t expect to have all of their votes finalized until “early next week.”

The Chairman of Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors just said that there are around 400,000 ballots left to be counted and that they won’t be done until “early next week.” pic.twitter.com/9zQuZKyLtG

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 10, 2022

The delayed counting in Maricopa comes on top of the county’s Election Day fiasco, where vote tabulation machines in roughly 20 percent of Maricopa’s voting locations stopped working due to a “printer issue.” Local officials have since issued a public apology for their gross incompetence, saying in a statement that they are “confident in the work still to be done to count every vote securely and accurately.”

But the problems witnessed throughout Arizona this week are hardly exclusive to the 2022 midterms. Earlier this year, it took two days for election officials to determine that Kari Lake had won her race to become Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial candidate. As described by the New York Post, “[e]arly election results showing only mail ballots received before Election Day” had given the advantage to Lake’s chief opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson. Lake’s victory was only realized after Maricopa County had released results from “thousands of mail ballots” that were dropped off at voting locations on Election Day.

Similar delays in election results were also notable in the 2020 presidential contest between former President Donald Trump and then-candidate Joe Biden. While some outlets such as the Associated Press

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