Maricopa County counted election results faster than any previous election

MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz. - Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 5 p.m. is the deadline for provisional ballots needing verification from voters in Arizona. But that doesn't mean ballot counting will be finished in the state.

Thousands of ballots remain uncounted in several counties, including ballots in Maricopa County, the state's most populous county.

Tuesday marks the deadline for curing ballot issues like mismatched signatures or providing an ID for a provisional ballot. Tuesday's new batch of results includes ballots that took a little extra time to count.

"As you can see, the machines aren't running behind me because these ballots need to be processed before they can be counted so those could be the military and overseas ballots that are in a different format ... we have to put them on the right size paper to run through the tabulation machine and those are bipartisan teams doing the process," explained Erika Flores with the Maricopa County Elections Department.

Many people are asking why the counting process is taking so long, but it turns out this is the fastest the department has ever counted them -- in a year with record voter turnout when more than two million ballots were cast.

In 2018, it took 14 days to count 1.4 million ballots and in 2016, it took 10 days to count 1.6 million ballots.

Flores says a new state law helped make ballot counting quicker this election.

"We were able to start counting ballots two weeks before. That's because of the new state law and then we have faster tabulation machines. They can count six to eight thousand ballots compared to our previous equipment that only counted three thousand ballots per hour," Flores explained.

For more information on the election and results, visit this link.