Maricopa County has finished counting ballots from Tuesday’s special election and the unofficial results are in.
It was an easily decided win for the firefighters and police pension plan, Proposition 124. However, it was a close victory for the education funding bill, Proposition 123, which received just less than 52 percent of the vote.
MORE: Pro-Prop 123 Margin Widens, Arizona Treasurer DeWit Won't Concede Yet
Elizabeth Bartholomew, with the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, said the final unofficial tally came down to the early ballots brought to precincts on Election Day which had to be verified.
“The process kind of has to start from there. We have to take them to our ballot printing company; they scan those early ballots into the computer so we can see the signatures. Because then we have to check every single signature of those early ballots that are dropped off,” she said.
Bartholomew said the process of counting all the ballots did not take very long. She said it can take more than three days when there are more than two initiatives to be voted on.
For Tuesday’s special election, Maricopa County opened twice the number of polling locations compared to the 60 for the March Presidential Preference Election.
A little bit more than 30 percent of the county’s registered voters participated.
But, Bartholomew said the voters were the priority for them .
“Ever since we started preparing for this election, we mostly had in mind what happened during the Presidential Preference Election in March and what had upset the voters, and what the voters wanted, and what they wanted changed," said Bartholomew. "So, we really took that into account for how we prepared and planned for this election, rather than the propositions.”
Bartholomew said now that the county has finished counting the ballots for the special election they can work developing a plan for the August primary and November General Election.
