County Recorder’s Office explains why it takes a long time to count Maricopa County ballots

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) - So many of Arizona’s races have been too close to call so far, so everyone is keeping a close eye on the next batch of results. The next election update is expected to happen around 6 p.m. tonight from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office.

While it may be hard to say exactly how many ballots have been counted so far on Wednesday, the results could be anywhere from 50 ballots to 100,00 ballots. Arizona’s Family has been told there are roughly 400,000 outstanding ballots in Maricopa County. About 275,000 of those are early ballots dropped off on Election Day. In the 2020 election, around 170,000 early ballots were dropped off on Election Day.

There are also around 17,000 ballots that had to be put in drop boxes at voting centers on Tuesday because of troubles with ballot tabulators. Many individuals in the community have complained about how long it takes to count up the ballots in Maricopa County, and many are asking why it can’t be done faster. County Recorder Stephen Richter says that because there’s so many early ballots that come in on election day, it takes extra time to validate them.

“We do what we always do with early ballots, we scan the barcode that links to a registered voter. We make sure that’s a valid, registered voter and make sure the voter hasn’t cast a ballot previously, and then we capture the image of that signature affidavit,” Richter said. “And then, we lock that into our database, and we review the signature. Once the signature is matched, we can forward that to the bipartisan ballot processing team.”

Election officials say the option of delivering early ballots on election day may be an issue the public needs to address if they wan the results to come in sooner.

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