Cochise County’s elections director reminded voters and candidates on Wednesday that “no local race is set in stone yet” because about 14,000 ballots await counting, even as Arizona’s 11 unclaimed electoral votes has both Presidential candidates looking for every possible vote.
“We know results are important,” Lisa Marra noted in a 4 p.m. update. “We all know -or should- that numbers on election night are not ever final. It’s critical never to sacrifice accuracy for speed.”
Marra estimated about 3,000 provisional ballots are included in the uncounted totals. Counting the remaining ballots will resume in earnest Thursday; Marra said no counts were conducted Wednesday because the elections staff “had other important work that must be completed by a strict legal timeline.”
One reason for the backlog, Marra noted, was that a federal court unexpectedly extended Arizona’s voter registration deadline by 10 days, from Oct. 5 to Oct. 15. That required the county recorder’s office to handle nearly 2,000 new registrations at the same time early voting began on Oct. 7.
“That court order hit every rural county hard,” Marra noted, adding that thousands of voters returned their early ballots before Oct. 15 and hundreds of voters a day began showing up at the Cochise County Recorder’s Office to vote in-person.
But those early ballots could not be immediately processed because “early ballots can’t be scanned into the system for processing while you are still issuing ballots,” she noted.
Marra recognized the work of Cochise County Record David Stevens, his staff, and Early Election Board members for the “amazing job” they did in processing a record-breaking 36,858 early voting ballots by the end of Election Day.
“It’s incredible that both of our departments were able to make up 10 days of lost time,” Marra noted, although she understood the frustration of many voters who were concerned over the last month that the Recorder’s Office didn’t show their ballots being received.
More than 56 percent of Cochise County’s 82,000 registered voters cast ballots in the General Election. The surprise, however, was that nearly 80 percent of the ballots were cast before Election Day.
“It was scary to voters who looked on the my.arizona.vote portal, like we told them to, and they couldn’t see it was returned back,” she noted, adding that the U.S. Postal Service delivered ballots “promptly.”
Marra acknowledged there were some questions about whether Cochise County officials could have been better staffed, but others point out a voter registration deadline change and the COVID-19 inspired acceptance of early balloting could not have been forecast.
“It’s easy to say you should have hired more people or worked longer hour,” she noted. “Election work is not something that can be put to any temporary employee.”