Mail vote shouldn’t slow count

Officials deal with shift in how voters cast ballots

Arizona elections officials expect more voters to cast ballots by mail in today’s primary due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but don’t anticipate it will delay the vote count.

As more Arizonans have voted by mail, it has caused delays in deciding the outcome of some races.

Signatures on early ballots that are mailed in late or dropped off at the polls must be verified. The verification process,

which must be done after Election Day, can take days or weeks.

But election officials in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties said they don’t expect that will happen in the August primary for a few reasons:

A change in state law allowed election officials to start tallying incoming ballots 14 days before Tuesday’s primary. Previously, ballot counting could begin seven days before Election Day. The change will allow counties to clear any backlog of mail-in ballots before they begin counting votes cast on Election Day.

Efforts to encourage voters to mail their ballots by the Wednesday before Election Day seemed to have had an effect. The earlier ballots arrive, the earlier they can be processed and counted.

Election systems upgrades and increased staffing in Maricopa County have allowed the early ballots to be processed much faster than in previous years, Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes said. The changes have prevented “a giant pile-up” of early ballots, he said.

With the new system officials no longer have to pause the system to tally votes, which meant tabulators had to stop counting ballots to crunch numbers every four hours. In addition, the elections department has 26 new staff members, which means tabulators aren’t pulled off of vote counting to help set up polling places.

“We don’t have to cut short staff in the tabulation center to go out and set up polling places, which means we can

continue to tabulate even on Election Day and immediately the day after,” he said.

Typically, elections officials across the state pause the counting of the early ballots on the Monday before Election Day to do election preparations. But this year they haven’t had to do that.

Fontes also said the county also added “I Voted” stickers to early ballots as an additional enticement for people to mail their ballot rather than go to the polls to drop it off and get the popular stickers.

In Maricopa County, more ballots have been processed prior to Election Day in 2020 than were cast in the 2018 or 2016 primary elections, in part because of a larger number of registered voters this year.

In 2018, there were almost 700,000 total votes cast in the 2018 primary, according to data provided by the Recorder’s Office. This year, there have already been about 719,000 ballots cast, according to county data.

With that early vote, the percentage of people voting in 2020, at 29%, has already surpassed the turnout of the 2016 primary, which was 27% in Maricopa County.

It appears likely to surpass the 31% participation rate of the 2018 primary (which had a higher participation rate because there were fewer registered voters.)

In 2018, 85.5% of voters cast early ballots, Fontes said, adding he thinks early votes will tick even higher this year, because of COVID-19 and because people like the ease of voting by mail.

But it can’t go much higher because Maricopa’s vote-by-mail share is already so high, he said.

“Maricopa County is already there. Arizona is already there,” Fontes said. “For all intents and purposes, we are already a vote-by-mail state. But that’s because that’s what the voters have wanted and that’s how they vote.”

In Pima County, the number of ballots processed and counted is almost even with the number of total voters from the 2018 primaries.

Chris Roads, Pima County’s Registrar of Voters, said the Recorder’s Office had signature verified 202,000 ballots as of mid-day Monday and sent most of those to the Elections Department to be counted.

In 2018, nearly 210,000 total ballots