ALL THE TIME

Nov 11, 2022 | 8:00 pm ET

By Kate Queram

An election worker scans a ballot in Maricopa County, where it’s taking a long time to count ballots because there are a ton of ballots, and also because it always takes a long time to count ballots in Arizona. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Election 2022: Week One was a doozy, but I have a feeling Election 2022: Week Two is going to be a next-level doozy. Which is nice, you know? The news has been so slow lately, so it’s great to finally have something to write about.*

*EXTREME SARCASM, THERE IS SO MUCH NEWS ALL THE TIME

The Big Takeaway

I had loosely planned (hoped) to call this the TGIF edition, as in “Thank God It’s Finalized,” which I obviously cannot do because nothing is finalized. (It was a bad title, so it’s fine, though I stand behind the sentiment.) Here’s what we know today: Republicans will probably end up with a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives — as of Friday afternoon, they’d clinched 211 of the 218 seats needed for control — but there are still too many outstanding races to say for sure.

It’s a similar deal for the Senate, where three seats remain in play as officials continue to count ballots in Nevada and Arizona (Georgia has a runoff in December). Roughly 82% of votes had been tallied as of Friday in Arizona, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly led by more than 5 percentage points after Thursday’s final ballot drop. But there’s still a mountain of outstanding votes, and Republicans expect those to fall the same way in-person votes did on Election Day: To the right, the Arizona Mirror reported.

If you’re having flashbacks to 2020, you’re not alone — Arizona took forever to tally its ballots then, too. In fact, election results always take forever in Arizona. There’s a simple explanation for this — the state allows voters to drop off mail-in ballots on Election Day, which leaves officials with skyscraper-sized piles to comb through after the polls close — but the conspiracy-minded among us are all too happy to ignore that fact when the counts don’t favor their candidates.

Enter Kari Lake, the MAGA princess who’s trailing by about 1.5 percentage points in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, a gap she attributed to a nefarious effort from county officials to “slow-roll” the vote tabulation to delay her inevitable victory. This is a lie (a pretty bad lie, at that), and it went over about as well as you’d expect in a place like Maricopa County, where workers have been counting votes around the clock all week, per the Arizona Mirror.

“I do not want the people of Maricopa County to think we’re picking and choosing which ballots to tabulate,” Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates said during a Thursday news conference. “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this, when they’re working 14 to 18 hours [per day].”

Imagine spending 14 hours counting ballots and then going online to find out that Kari Lake thinks you’re being slow on purpose. (And also, you seem to live in an office.) (Photo by pompixs/Adobe Stock)

Officials originally expected to have most of the county’s votes tabulated by Friday, but that deadline was pushed back after Election Day, when 290,000 voters dropped off their early ballots. As of Friday, about 330,000 were left in the queue. Election workers will scan each one, then compare the signature on the envelope to previous signatures from each individual voter. Whenever there’s a mismatch, county officials attempt to contact the voter to confirm the ballot’s authenticity, a process that can continue through next Wednesday.

It’s time-consuming, and — this is important — it’s always been time-consuming, which should be obvious to anyone who’s ever paid attention to an election in Arizona. (Presumably that should include someone hoping to be the state’s governor, but this is an election in 2022, so nothing matters.) Those concerned about the efficiency of the process would do well to learn about it (this is not hard), but I’m sure they won’t! They are probably too busy watching Lake tell lies on Newsmax or threatening the lives of election workers, both productive and normal activities that will definitely improve the turnaround time!

“No one should be the subject of death threats,” Gates said, once again stating the obvious because apparently “the obvious” is a subjective term for a lot of people. “Particularly not those who are simply trying to keep our democracy afloat and count the votes and make sure that every eligible voter’s ballot is treated with respect.”

Ballots in Nevada, being respected. (Screenshot via the Nevada Current)

It’s basically the exact same situation in Nevada: A close Senate race (Republican Adam Laxalt was up by less than 1 percentage point on Friday), election workers doing their best to verify voters’ signatures, and officials being forced to take time to respond to stupid conspiracy theories with no basis in reality that, somehow, still gain traction. The nonsense this time came directly from Donald Trump, the country’s foremost conspiracy theorist, who alleged in a Truth Social (lol) post that “Clark County, Nevada has a corrupt voting system.”

Trump, who has to use Truth Social because Elon Musk hasn’t let him back on Twitter, went on to frame the counting process in the county and in Arizona as attempts to find new ways to commit fraud, saying, “They want more time to cheat!”

Officials in Clark County swatted down the lies during a press conference on Thursday, acknowledging that the post would get “certain people very fired up” even though it was ”unfortunate,” the Nevada Current reported.

“They’re convinced that we’re doing things that are inappropriate or against the law, and that’s just not the case,” said Joe Gloria, the county’s top election official. “Obviously, he’s misinformed two years later about the law and our election process.”

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria, who is probably tired. (Photo by Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)

The county outlined that process in an additional statement, noting that under state law, jurisdictions are required to accept ballots through Saturday as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. (Those are separate from provisional ballots, which can’t be processed until the 16th.) The law also requires counties to verify signatures on every ballot, “and if one does not match what is in our records, we are required by law to give that voter until 5 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 14, to cure their signature,” the statement said.

This is a diplomatic and technical way of explaining that you can’t cut corners when you’re counting votes — that would be fraud (the thing Trump is always complaining about but also, apparently, now advocating for). Every detail of the process is spelled out in the law, which makes it impossible to just, you know, do it faster because the bankrupt casino guy said you should.

Roughly 50,000 mail-in ballots remained uncounted as of Thursday, and officials said they expected to finish processing most of them by Saturday. But in the end, it’ll take however long it takes, Gloria added.

“We don’t want to move too fast. We want to make sure we’re being accurate when validating the signatures and the identity of the folks who voted,” he said. “We are moving at a good pace for the amount of equipment and staff that we have on board.”

Accuracy is kind of the whole point: Louisiana elections secure, but voting machines still vulnerable … (Michigan) Karamo still hasn’t conceded, tells supporters to ‘standby’ for more election fraud conspiracies … Michigan GOP finger-pointing underway following Tuesday’s historic loss at the polls … Brinks and Tate make Michigan history as next leaders of the Legislature … Missouri’s Josh Hawley says red wave fizzled because of ‘Washington Republicanism’ … (Nevada) Democratic House incumbents poised to survive redistricting gambit … Fossil fuel money flows to New Mexico Democrats … Early data shows young voters came out big for Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, Fetterman … (South Dakota) Tripp County will need court order to investigate mismatch between hand count and audit … Texas avoided election violence. Advocates say voters still need more protection.