What to expect on Election Day in Maricopa County

The majority of Maricopa County residents vote by mail, but county officials say Election Day voters should still prepare to face long lines on Tuesday.

Election officials said that 1.5 million voters had cast early ballots as of Monday morning.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said his office has verified signatures on about 1.4 million ballots so far and fully processed about 1.2 million ballots, meaning they are ready to be counted.

But Richer said there are 27,000 ballots with signatures that needed to be cured. That means the signature on the ballot envelope didn’t match the voter signature election officials

“Now what curing is, is that's the process by which we attempt to contact the voter if we cannot match the signature,” Richer said.

Richer said the county has been able to cure, or verify, 15,000 of those ballots so far.

Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates said officials are still expecting as many as 600,000 additional voters to cast their ballots on Election Day.

The county has invested around $10 million to speed up the voting process. That includes purchasing new printers and ballot tabulators and opening more vote centers than in past elections.

But Assistant County Manager Zach Schira urged voters to exercise patience, saying they could face long lines as they wait for fellow citizens to complete filling out a longer-than-normal, two-page ballot. Officials have long urged voters to research candidates and ballot issues ahead of time, so they are prepared to fill out that ballot.

“But as Americans, we're used to waiting in line,” Schira said. “We wait in line for coffee, we wait in line for our groceries. Sometimes we wait in line for new sneakers or video games, if that's your thing. We can wait in line to exercise our right to vote.”

Officials said initial election results that will be announced at 8 p.m. on election night should account for about 55% of the total vote, and Schira said the majority of votes will be counted within 24 hours after polls close.

“But it's important to remember that here in Arizona, our races are extremely close, and it still might take a few days for you the media to call those races,” Schira said.

The county’s ability to count votes could also be delayed by the two-page ballot — which takes longer to be processed by the bipartisan boards charged with opening early-ballot envelopes — and a new Republican law that requires election workers to count all early-ballot envelopes dropped off on Election Day before they deliver election results to the county’s central counting facility.

“We are happy to comply with this new law, but this will delay the time it takes for vote centers to close up and for us to get those Election Day results on memory cards back to our central counting facility,” Schira said.