Maricopa County election officials have yet again pushed back the deadline for when 2022 midterm election results will be finalized. Maricopa County is the largest county in Arizona and the fastest growing county in the country.
Originally, officials said all votes would be counted by Friday. Now, they're saying things might be wrapped up after the weekend.
Bill Gates, Chairman of Maricopa County's Board of Supervisors, just said that there are 400,000 ballots left to be counted in Maricopa alone and they won't be tabulated until "early next week” not including some “onesies, twosies” here and there. Unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/pP5RqmHkOs
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 10, 2022
On Thursday, county officials started tabulating mail-in ballots that were dropped off rather than sent through the mail. Given the kinds of ballots and where the final totals will come from, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake believes things are moving in her direction.
.@KariLake: "One of the reasons that I will win is the voters in Arizona are tired of shoddy elections that are run by imbeciles. And that's going to change." pic.twitter.com/A6HNLUqsGz
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 10, 2022
The counting delay comes on the heels of major tabulation problems on Election Day, when 25 percent of Maricopa County machines were not working.
"We are confident in the work still to be done to count every vote securely and accurately," Maricopa County Chairman Bill Gates and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman released in a joint statement Thursday. "To impacted voters, we recognize this isn’t how you pictured Election Day and we apologize for that inconvenience. We are committed to counting all legal votes and then finding the root cause of what happened so that it does not happen again."
Meanwhile, just north in Nevada election officials also issued a delay and said remaining ballots won't be counted until next week.
Clark County, Nevada has 50,000 ballots left to be tallied and it's going to take until Monday to finish counting them. pic.twitter.com/sJDspkvWWo
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 10, 2022