An election employee arrives with ballots to be tabulated contained in the Maricopa County recorder’s workplace in Phoenix on Wednesday.

Matt York/AP

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Matt York/AP

An election employee arrives with ballots to be tabulated contained in the Maricopa County recorder’s workplace in Phoenix on Wednesday.

Matt York/AP

Election officers within the swing state of Arizona are nonetheless processing and counting a whole bunch of hundreds of ballots forged throughout this 12 months’s midterm elections, leaving the outcomes of key races in limbo.

Experts say a mix of Arizona’s voting legal guidelines and shifting voter conduct are guilty for the lengthy anticipate vote totals, and tight margins imply retailers like The Associated Press cannot name sure contests.

Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser on the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County election official, principally as a federal compliance officer. Maricopa is house to Phoenix and greater than half the state’s voters.

Patrick says the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona have not modified loads since her time there. But she says voter conduct and political realities have.

For one, Patrick says she thinks voters in Arizona have modified their voting conduct in response to all of the misinformation that has been circulating about mail-in ballots.

“There has been this narrative around voting by mail that it is ripe with fraud and … you shouldn’t trust it,” she says.

This mistrust, Patrick says, might be why extra voters determined to drop off their poll at a polling website on Election Day, versus mailing it days upfront.

“It’s typical for Maricopa County to see about 180,000 ballots be turned in on Election Day,” she says. “When I was there for that decade that was kind of the standard number.”

This 12 months, although, native election officers reported a whopping 290,000 ballots have been dropped off at polling areas on Election Day.

“So, we don’t know if that’s because voters heard these stories around drop boxes being a bad way to turn in your ballot or because they saw the vigilantes and the watchers and a few of them did not really feel snug dropping them at drop bins,” Patrick says.

Voters may need additionally heard messaging about voting on Election Day being a greater choice, Patrick says, and determined to show within the mail poll they already had as a substitute of ready in a line.

“That’s what is so challenging in this moment is really having an understanding of who these voters were and what their motivations were,” she says.

Criticisms and comparisons

Whatever the rationale for the inflow, although, now election officers must course of and tabulate all these ballots. That means signature verification and ballots being checked by bipartisan groups.

Patrick says one factor that would velocity up this course of is an “extraction” machine. Many counties in Florida, particularly, use an inhouse gadget that cuts the highest of an envelope with a laser after which opens the envelope with air, which makes it a lot simpler to take away the poll.

“That’s much, much faster than having the processing board sitting there literally with letter openers opening up over a million envelopes,” she says.

Broadly talking Arizona and Florida have related deadlines and processing guidelines for mail ballots, although some smaller laws and procedures — just like the inhouse extraction Patrick described — provide some key differences. Regardless, Florida has change into a popular point of comparison for these on the political proper criticizing Arizona’s elections administration.

Among these taking purpose at Arizona’s elections administration are Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, and Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state. Both Lake and Finchem have echoed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Counting continues to be ongoing throughout the nation

Regardless of state legal guidelines and practices, although, virtually all jurisdictions within the U.S. are nonetheless technically counting and processing votes.

In Leon County, Fla., officers there stated in a press release that despite the fact that they “have the overwhelming majority of ballots counted and election results reported by election night,” there’s nonetheless work that must be completed. That contains processing provisional ballots and ballots from overseas.

Patrick says despite the fact that the media calls races on election night time, “there isn’t a state in the nation that declares winners on Election Day because they still have so much work to do,” which incorporates curing mail poll signatures and processing abroad votes.

Ultimately, she says, Arizona is below this type of scrutiny principally due to the political significance of the outcomes of key races there, in addition to how shut vote margins have gotten in Arizona. She says as a result of the media feels much less snug calling the race proper now, the notion is that that is taking for much longer.

“This is how long it always takes,” Patrick says. “The work continues until every eligible vote is counted.”