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A record for midterm vote: Arizona’s highest-ever turnout is projected.
Arizona voters have rarely been this energized for a midterm election.
The Arizona Republic projects about 2.18 million voters, or 58.6 percent of those registered, cast a ballot before the polls closed at 7 p.m. That would be the most votes cast in a midterm election in state history.
Even before Tuesday, more people had voted in this year’s midterms than did in the last midterm election in 2014. An estimated three-fourths of Arizona voters already will have cast their ballot before Tuesday.
Larger-than-expected numbers appeared to show up at the polls Tuesday, meaning this election could see the highest-ever turnout for a midterm — though still far short of the turnout in presidential election years. As of 7:35 p.m., about 250,000 votes had been cast in person in Maricopa County, Garrett Archer, data analyst with the Secretary of State’s Office, said on Twitter. Archer estimated late Tuesday night that
950,000 ballots remained to be counted statewide.
About 350,000 people cast votes on Election Day in 2016.
The highest voter turnout for a midterm since 1998 was in 2006, when 60.5 percent of voters cast ballots.
Here are the midterm turnout percentages since 1998:
❚ 1998: 45.8 percent.
❚ 2002: 56.3 percent.
❚ 2006: 60.5 percent.
❚ 2010: 55.7 percent.
❚ 2014: 47.5 percent.
Voters in the Phoenix area ran into problems Tuesday morning with access to polls and technological failures that turned at least some away from voting.
One polling place in Chandler had been foreclosed overnight. Workers were able to access the site hours after it was supposed to open. Voters at polling places from Deer Valley to downtown Phoenix to eastern Mesa reported long lines that poll workers blamed on the printers. And at least one polling place, in north Phoenix, ran out of ballots, a voter there said.
Keely Varvel, Maricopa County’s chief deputy recorder, said in an email to staff that the “ballot-on-demand” printers weren’t functioning properly for a few hours, but the department was able to do “patch repairs” to fix the problem.
About 11:30 a.m., the county’s voter check-in system went offline for 20 minutes. Varvel said the outage was caused by “an internal database transaction.”
Fontes said the long lines voters might experience resulted from the high turnout and the long ballot.
The fate of about 3,000 ballots cast in Maricopa County on Saturday and Monday at five polling places dubbed “emergency vote centers” was up in the air after the state Republican Party threatened a lawsuit.
The Arizona GOP sent a letter to all county recorders Sunday questioning the legality of some emergency voting practices. The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office offered “emergency voting” from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Monday for voters who could not make it to the polls on Election Day.
The Recorder’s Office said it allowed voters to determine what constitutes an emergency. This is the first year Maricopa County has offered emergency voting, but other counties have offered the extra polling hours for years.
In its letter, the GOP argued that state law does not allow recorders to offer early voting after the Friday prior to Election Day except in specifically defined emergency situations. It asked the counties to “identify and segregate all ballots” cast at emergency vote centers.