Polls may have closed across the country two days ago, but in the battleground state of Arizona, they are still counting.
A record number of ballots dropped off at Maricopa County vote centers has delayed results until Monday at the earliest. Initially, election officials said they’d have the final tally by Friday but extended their self-imposed deadline and said they’d continue counting through the weekend.
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The move, stemming from a massive number of dropped-off ballots, has once again put Arizona’s most populated county under the national spotlight. Arizona was at the center of former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of a rigged 2020 election.
With control of the U.S. Senate on the line, the announcement that more time would be needed to count ballots only fed into the heated rhetoric from Republican candidates suggesting something more nefarious might be taking place.
GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who described herself to the Washington Examiner as “Donald Trump with softer edges,” suggested without proof that election officials were intentionally “slow-rolling” the results to delay her victory.
Lake’s Democratic challenger, Katie Hobbs, the current secretary of state, had a small lead Friday morning even though Maricopa County still had more than 400,000 ballots to count.
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So far, the county has tallied 1.2 million votes.
“We have so many close races that people are still paying attention to Maricopa County,” Bill Gates, the Board of Supervisors chairman, said Thursday.
About 290,000 mail-in ballots were dropped off at Maricopa County vote centers on Tuesday, beating the record for drop-off ballots by about 70%, officials said.
Arizona isn’t the only state that is still counting votes, though the results in the Grand Canyon State could tip the balance of power in the Senate.
In Alaska, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is locked in a tight race against fellow GOP candidate Kelly Tshibaka. This is the first year that ranked choice elections are taking place in the state. Under the system, voters list their first choice on their ballots and then rank the others in order of preference.
Neither Murkowski nor Tshibaka had enough votes for an outright win, so the contest is now in a ranked choice runoff. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and ballots cast for that person are recast for the voters’ second choices. The process is repeated until one candidate reaches a 50% majority.
In California, the state secretary of state’s office tweeted Tuesday: “Today is NOT Election Results Day. County elections officials have 30 days to process and verify all ballots received. The Secretary of State will certify CA election results by December 16th.”
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A day later, the office tweeted: “Counting Takes Time.”
Mail-in ballots are popular in the state but take a lot longer to verify and count.
