PHOENIX β Arizonaβs potential to have an outsize impact on the presidential race is strengthened by the number of ballots in the state left to be counted.
There are at least 590,000 ballots that have yet to be tallied, figures late Wednesday afternoon from the Secretary of Stateβs Office showed.
And whether they change the outcome of any of the races depends on whether the choices made by the people who cast these yet-to-be counted ballots are different than those already run through Arizonaβs tabulating machines.
The Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner in Arizona early Wednesday morning. Other major news outlets have held off on making similar projections.
Of whatβs left, about 380,000 uncounted ballots are from Maricopa County. That compares with the more than 1.6 million votes in that county that already had been counted late Wednesday.
Another more than 90,000 are estimated in Pima County out of nearly 460,000 tallied.
The balance are in the stateβs rural counties.
Murphy Hebert, aide to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said some counties like Mohave, Cochise and Apache, have not passed along how many untallied ballots they have.
It is those kind of numbers that have Gov. Doug Ducey telling people that it remains too early to declare that Joe Biden is the first Democrat to get a majority here since Bill Clinton outpolled Republican Bob Dole in 1996.
One issue is how many of the uncounted votes are those that were cast on Election Day.
Statewide, Biden had more than 200,000 more votes than Trump among those who cast early ballots. But of the more than 370,000 votes counted so far that were made at polling places, Trump was leading by a margin of close to 2-to-1.
The margin between Democrat Mark Kelly and Republican incumbent Martha McSally in the statewide U.S. Senate race was larger, with the challenger leading by about 145,000 votes out of more than 2.6 million cast.
In both races, though, the margin of support for the leader has been more or less steady throughout the counting. That likely reduces the chances that the yet-to-be-counted votes will change the ultimate outcome.
That, however, is not the case in the down-ballot legislative races where the lead has gone back and forth β and where the margin of victory for the apparent winner is a lot thinner.
In the LD6 House race, for example, which stretches from Flagstaff through northeast Arizona, Democrat Coral Evans was fewer than 300 votes behind Republican Brenda Barton. And in LD21 in the Sun City and Peoria area, incumbent Republican Kevin Payne was leading Democrat Kathy Knecht by just 44 votes.
Garrick Taylor, spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, also is hanging his hat on the uncounted ballots to turn the tide that, up until now, has shown consistent voter support for a 3.5% tax surcharge on the incomes of the richest Arizonans.
That measure at last count was winning by more than 135,000 votes.
Also close is the race for the three seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission, with Republican Jim OβConnor running fourth out of the six contenders, fewer than 10,000 votes behind Democrat Bill Mundell.
