Arizona Senate race count might take days

PHOENIX — Arizona’s nationally watched and incredibly tight Senate race between Republican Martha Mcsally and Democrat Kristin Sinema may not have a declared winner until Thursday or even next week because, ironically, the state’s voters like to cast their ballots early.

About three-quarters of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail. But many ballots known as “late earlies” arrive in the mail on Election Day or in the few days leading up to it, or are hand-delivered by voters. Those ballots can create logjams at the state’s 15 county recorders’ offices where vote counting is conducted.

All mailed ballots and the ballots that could have been mailed but were dropped off by the voters require a series of labor-intensive verifications. Voter signatures on the envelopes containing the ballots must be verified before the votes are tabulated.

Mcsally and Sinema were separated Wednesday by a small fraction of the tabulated votes, with hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots still outstanding. More than 600,000 votes were uncounted in a race in which more than 2 million people cast ballots. Officials in the most populous part of Arizona, Maricopa County, said they won’t start releasing late earlies and some other votes until late Thursday.

The sluggish count is a perennial issue for Arizona, but has rarely received such a high level of attention because the Gop-leaning state generally has had few nationally watched nail-biting contests.

Mcsally and Sinema planned no public appearances Wednesday.

Mcsally tweeted early Wednesday that she was going “to bed with a lead of over 14,000 votes.”

Sinema tweeted that the “race is about you and we’re going to make sure your vote is counted.”