Results from Tuesday's Special Primary Election for Arizona's 8th Congressional District will take slightly longer due to higher security procedures safeguarding votes.
With about 80 percent of voters using mail-in ballots, Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes said Arizona does a decent job cutting off would-be hackers from interfering with the election process.
"That's because it's extremely difficult to intercept paper ballots delivered directly to the election office from millions of voters' mailboxes," he said.
The challenge is protecting day-of-ballots once sent by analog phone systems to the central office from some two dozen precincts across the county.
"Now, the precinct tabulators - those memory packs will be physically transported back to Central count, which is far more secure for election night reporting," Fontes said.
Those sealed voters' envelopes will remain under armed guard until all results are opened and tallied at the central warehouse.
As a result, Fontes said he expects it will take a few more minutes than normal to process, up to an hour longer than in the past depending on the distance from where a precinct is sending ballots.
