Arizona AG wants election results withheld until last ballot is cast

PHOENIX — The state’s top prosecutor wants to bar county election officials from releasing any election results until the last person waiting in line has cast a ballot.

Mark Brnovich cited the problems that occurred this week in Maricopa County where some people did not get into polling places for the presidential preference primary until close to midnight. In the meantime, those polling places that had closed were releasing the results.

More to the point, Brnovich said, those results were being broadcast and published on the Internet.

He said there were people waiting in line for hours after the polls were set to close at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

By law, voting cannot be halted until the last person who was in line at that hour gets to cast a ballot.

“Some media person tells them election officials have already said that Donald Trump’s won or Hillary Clinton’s won, there’s no need for you to be in line,” Brnovich said. He said that can result in the person simply deciding his or her vote doesn’t matter and going home.

“And we know that elections are sometimes close,” he said, citing the 2000 presidential race in Florida.

“Why don’t we wait until all the polls are closed before releasing any official results?” Brnovich said.

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Ideally, he said, election officials would make the decision themselves to withhold the results.

“We don’t have that authority,” said Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne.

She said her agency follows state law that says the first returns cannot be released until 8 p.m., an hour after official closing time. Those results, Osborne said, are of the early ballots that have been tabulated.

Then, as individual precinct returns come in, those are posted on the county’s web site.

Brnovich said the way he envisions the law, it would apply statewide. Put another way, even if Cochise County officials had counted all the ballots, there could be no release of information publicly if people were still in line in Maricopa County.

Brnovich said that’s important because many races are on statewide issues. And he said he doesn’t want to affect the outcome of those results by people hearing preliminary results and extrapolations of what that will mean statewide.

The attorney general stressed he was not looking to stop media outlets from “calling” races based on their own information, like exit polls. But he did not want TV stations using official results to make those same calls while people are still voting.

“We want to make sure that no one feels like their vote is being undermined,” Brnovich said.