The polls closed in Arizona two days for the 2022 midterm elections and we still don’t have an official winner for the Senate and Governor races.
Arizona year after year does not have results on election night and releases numerous waves of ballot counts days past the election. In order to have trust in our election system, the public needs results fast because the more time that passes, the more Americans begin to distrust the results.
Currently no winners have been declared in the Senate race between Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Republican Blake Masters and the Governor’s race between Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs and Republican candidate Kari Lake. Besides the top-of-the-ticket races, Arizona has yet to determine the winners for attorney general, secretary of state, and the U.S. house seats.
With thousands of ballots still outstanding, Kari Lake is trailing a half a point behind Katie Hobbs with other Republican candidates trailing narrowly behind.
In Arizona, most of their voting occurs via the mail and takes along time as Maricopa county has 2.4 million registered voters. The vote by mail system in Arizona can’t be counted until the polls close on election day, but the early voting process can be counted beforehand.
On election day in a quarter of the voting centers in Maricopa County, the printers were not correctly printing out ballots for those voting in person and caused a delay but was eventually fixed so voters could cast their ballot.
What seems to be the major issue is most counties in Arizona don’t count ballots at the voting centers rather they’re brought to a central location to be reviewed and counted. The transfer of ballots from the voting centers to the central facility takes time to transfer and a single facility takes a long time to count each ballot, inevitably making the process more confusing and time consuming than it needs to be.
Officials from Arizona have estimated that approximately 400,000 ballots are still left to be counted in Maricopa County with 275,000 of those ballots being votes cast on election day. Democrats tend to vote early or by mail whereas Republicans like to vote in person on election day, so with 275,000 outstanding same-day votes remaining in Maricopa County, Republican just may edge out a victory.