Two years ago, I was scrolling through the election news from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts waiting to see if Biden won and wondering what Maricopa County was and why it was taking so long for them to tally their votes. When I learned that Maricopa was the Phoenix metro area, I was confronted for the first time in my life by just how little I knew about what turns out to be the fifth largest city in the country. One thing I definitely did not know about Phoenix at the time was that I would be moving there within a year.
Now that I’m here, less than two miles from the Recorder’s Office where ballots continue to be counted at a rate of about 65,000/day, I’ve learned all sorts of things, for instance: Phoenix is home to four of the 30 largest urban parks in the entire world, the taproot of a mesquite tree can descend 200 feet into the ground, the 5,000 foot grassy highlands near the Mexican border can yield some pretty good wine, you should order Christmas tamales from The Tamale Store ahead of time, you shouldn’t honk at a lifted pickup with thin blue line bumper stickers, and Arizona is the only state to occasionally have the highest and lowest temperature in the entire country on the same day.
Winter is beautiful here. (Source: CEB Imagery via Flickr)
I’ve also begun to conduct some of my own research. For instance, I just recently discovered that while Arizona does not recognize daylight savings time, the Navajo Nation (located primarily in northeast Arizona) does, but entirely within the Navajo Nation the Hopi Nation does not, but within the Hopi Nation an enclave of the Navajo Nation does. So basically this means that for half the year 5PM is surrounded by 4PM which is surrounded by 5PM which is surrounded by 4PM, which is surrounded on two sides again by 5PM.
A four hour drive from Jeddito, an enclave of the Navajo Nation, to the New Mexico border would cross four time zone boundaries back and forth. If the Bureau of Indian Affairs ever set up an office in the town of Jeddito, it would be 4PM within the building since federal buildings in Arizona do not observe daylight savings.
One thing I don’t yet know is why it takes so long to count ballots here. So I did some research, reading many Twitter threads peppered between the recent onslaught of totally incredible corporate parody accounts that are taking over Twitter, and I even subjected myself to some Tucker Carlson monologues to “see both sides”. So, I can say comfortably now that there are some legitimate reasons why counting ballots here takes a while, and there are also some things that can definitely be improved.
To start, Maricopa County is the second largest voting district in the country, containing six of the hundred largest cities in the county and nearly 2.5 million registered voters. Of those, more than 1.9 million (~80%) are enrolled in early voting, meaning that they receive their ballot ahead of time in the mail. Voting by mail has always been more of a western thing, in large part due to the further distance between people and polling stations (High Country News wrote about this in the lead up to the 2020 election) and mail-in voting in Arizona is particularly high because the State has had a “no-excuse” early voting system in place since the 1990s, which means that any voter can request an early ballot, and because the breadth of the Arizona ballot is best filled out at home: in addition to the federal, state, and local people I voted for (or often, against), I had the chance to vote on whether about 50 judges should keep their jobs (!!!) and weigh in on a dozen state issues ranging from offering in-state tuition to undocumented student to increasing sales tax for 20 years to fund rural fire departments.
Survey from July 2020 looking at mail-in voting in 2016 and 2020. Before the pandemic, the eight states with more than 50% mail-in voting were all in the west. (Source: Datavizzer via Wikicommons)
Ok so Arizona gets lots of ballots sent in by mail, boo hoo, so what. Well firstly, it’s more complicated to account for mail-in ballots since they need to be both processed (through signature verification) and then tabulated, whereas day of ballots only need to be tabulated, since the processing happens before you enter the voting booth (more on that here). I thought this whole signature verification thing was hogwash until I received a call from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office after the Primary in August asking me to verify my identify because I had sort of just scribbled my signature on my ballot and it didn’t match my signature on record.
There are at least two additional things make mail-in ballots more complicated here. First, Arizona is one of 21 states that allow mail-in ballots to be physically dropped off on Election Day (the so-called “Late Earlies”), whereas many other states require ballots to be dropped off sooner so that processing can be completed before Election Day. Florida, for instance, does not allow day-of drop off and they have 95% of their mail-in ballots processed and tabulated by Election Day morning. The Maricopa County Recorder, Stephen Richter, picked up on this theme in a Twitter thread when he noted the other day that there is a tradeoff between allowing day-of drop off versus knowing more about the results of the election within 24 hours. But let’s hold this thought because Arizona already isn’t great at making voting accessible and ending day-of ballot drop offs would be a step in the wrong direction.
The second factor somewhat unique to Arizona is that there is rampant distrust of the voting process fanned by some of the truly terrifying candidates who still might get elected. Voters in Maricopa County dropped off a whopping 290,000 ballots on Election Day, and at least some of this volume was because Republicans have sown distrust in the Postal Service. This is what Kari Lake is betting on - that the final few hundred thousands votes tabulated are Late Earlies that skew heavily Republican. However there were also a bunch of right wing MAGA goons in the aforementioned lifted pickups “patrolling” ballot drop off centers in the lead up to the election, so yeah, I imagine that some Democrats might have wanted to hand their ballot in on Election Day as well.
Ok so Maricopa County gets a ton of ballots each election, the vast majority are mail-in ballots that require the extra step of signature verification, and this signature verification cannot be done in advance for more than a quarter million because they are dropped off on Election Day. This still feels like a weak answer, in part because Arizona DOES allow the mail-in ballots received AHEAD of time to be processed before Election Day, which is not universal. Many states, including heavily populated ones like New York and Pennsylvania don’t begin any ballot processing until Election Day.
Surely there must be something else that can explain this. NPR recently put this question to Tammy Patrick, senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, and buried deep in her thoughtful and verbose response about voter behavior, the political climate, and state law was what appears to be an EXTREMELY practical and actionable suggestion.
Patrick says one thing that could speed up this process is an "extraction" machine. Many counties in Florida, in particular, use an inhouse device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, which makes it much easier to remove the ballot. "That's much, much faster than having the processing board sitting there literally with letter openers opening up over a million envelopes," she says.
Um...yeah. I mean, having a laser-assisted, air puffing, envelope slicing machine sounds A LOT BETTER than opening millions of envelopes by hand. Costs for these machines are hard to come by, but I found a budget proposal for a 2018 municipal meeting north of Dallas where Collins County was asking for money to purchase an extractor for their elections. The Opex Model 72 was only $30k, though to be fair Opex really nails you with the annual support costs. If this is too rich for us Phoenicians, well I don’t think we are too proud a city to scour the secondary market, and to that I can offer up the incredibly to-the-point business “WeBuyAndSellUsedOpexEquipment.com”.
One of 22 (!!!) Opex ballot extractors that Philadelphia had on hand for the 2020 election, each capable of opening about 550 envelopes per hour, or one every six seconds, which is honestly a little less impressive than I was expecting. I mean, I feel like some people skilled in the art of envelope opening could match that rate for a while but maybe this is more of a tortoise and the hare situation. (Source: MaxMMarin via Twitter)
I found this information about the lasers encouraging, so I dug around a little more to see if there were other technical steps that Maricopa County could take to speed things up and, well, yes there are. Before ballots are processed and tabulated they first have to be scanned. In Maricopa County this happens somewhere different from where the ballots are collected and tabulated. So not only did Maricopa County receive 290,000 day-of ballots, it had to then transport them across town for scanning and then transport them all back to the Recorder’s Office where only then were the signatures verified and they were opened (by hand) for tabulation on Wednesday morning. Separately, it also seems like Maricopa County faced some ballot printers jamming, which is honestly something I think we can all relate to.
One final thing to point out is that counting ballots in Maricopa County seems to takes a long time because people are still paying attention to our close election. Maricopa County had about half a million ballots outstanding on election night, and they have been tabulating between 60k to 80k a day, which would probably seem very fast if there was a wide enough margin to have called the race by now. But given that our elections in this state are so close, and given that the stakes are even higher because our country has been gerrymandered by Republicans to seem equally distributed between two parties, and given that the delay in finalizing our votes here is fodder for the fascists to invite distrust in the system, it seems like the question for Maricopa County to consider in the next two years, without discrediting all the people working extremely hard to ensure a fair election, is “what it would take for us to double, triple, or quadruple the speed at which we are able to process ballots dropped off on Election Day?” This would go a long way to turn the attention away from us once Election Day passes.
Thanks for reading,
— Grif