Ariz. early votes may delay Senate result
Final tallies may come next week
PHOENIX — Arizona’s nationally watched and incredibly tight Senate race between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema may not have a declared winner until today, 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, in the few days leading up to it or are hand-delivered by the voters themselves. 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. The most populous part of Arizona, Maricopa County, said it won’t start releasing late earlies and some other votes until late today.
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 nailbiting contests.
One candidate familiar with the long wait is McSally. It took The Associated Press 12 days to name her the loser of her first congressional race, in 2012, because the margin was so narrow and vote counting was slow. McSally’s second, successful bid for the seat ended with a recount in December 2014, more than a month after the election.
McSally and Sinema scheduled no public appearances for Wednesday.
McSally tweeted early Wednesday that she was going “to bed with a lead of over 14,000 votes.”
She added: “We’re confident tomorrow will bring more good news.”
Sinema tweeted that the “race is about you and we’re going to make sure your vote is counted. There are a lot of outstanding ballots — especially those mailedin — and a lot of reasons to feel good!”
The cliffhanger Senate race comes in what’s otherwise shaping up to be another banner Arizona year for Republicans. The GOP has won every statewide race in Arizona over the past decade, and Democrats were hoping Sinema could break that streak.
Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was easily re-elected over a challenge from Democrat David Garcia, a college education professor. The GOP notched victories in the Attorney General, Treasurer and Secretary of State races, as well.
The picture was brighter for the state’s Democrats in Congress, where Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick was elected to the Tucson-area swing district seat vacated by McSally and Democrats held all their other four seats, giving them a majority of the state’s nine-member U.S. House delegation.
The election featured heavy statewide turnout of about 60 percent, more in line with a presidential election than a midterm — part of the reason county registrars were overloaded with uncounted ballots.
The Senate contest was the marquee race, featuring two champion fundraisers who are no strangers to tight races. They are battling over the seat vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican who decided not to run for re-election because he realized his criticism of President Donald Trump made it impossible for him to survive politically.