Pima County had about 30,000 ballots left to count from Tuesday's primary election, officials said Wednesday.
The county's Recorder’s Office has about 22,000 early and other ballots and about 4,200 provisional ballots to process and verify for tabulation. The Elections Department also still has to count about 3,100 ballots that were cast at voting centers Aug. 2.
The above number of ballots remaining is an estimate and may change as Elections and the Recorder’s Office work their way through the remaining ballots and the processes necessary to ensure all legally cast votes are counted, the county said in a news release Wednesday evening.
Several races from Tuesday remain close, but it is not known if the number of ballots left to count will change any outcomes.
Elections Director Constance Hargrove said she expects that all votes cast at vote centers should be counted by Wednesday.
"We had some vote centers where the checked-in voters tally didn’t match the number of ballots, and I needed to talk to the vote center inspectors to understand why. The deputy elections director spoke to them today, and we will count those ballots. In addition, one vote center had a printer problem that prevented the scanner from reading the ballot. These ballots require duplication."
Provisional ballots were issued to Election Day voters who were sent a mail ballot, had a change in address or otherwise required further investigation in their voter registration. Every provisional ballot is processed, though not every ballot will be eligible for tabulation, the county said.
The Recorder’s Office turns over verified ballots in batches of roughly 5,000 at a time to the Elections Department. The Elections Department will continue to count ballots each day until there are none left.
Officials must complete counting by Aug. 15, when the Board of Supervisors is expected to certify the canvas of election.
A trial run-through of the new voting process for Pima County’s elections was held on June 24. The mock election served as a test of the new voting system the Pima County Board of Supervisors approved in February. Participants of the mock election were given pretend voter identification cards to cast votes on ballots from 2018 as part of the practice run. In the new process, poll workers check in voters with an iPad, or e-pollbook, that scans voters’ IDs and confirms their eligibility to vote. Pascal Albright / Arizona Daily Star
