What voters can expect on Election Day

With one week until Election Day, Recorder Stephen Richer will discuss the latest on what voters need to know and what they can expect on Election Day.

“The election is probably at least 1/3 of the way through because we’ve already received back close to 700,000 early ballots. And we expect that we’ll have about 1.6 million voters in Maricopa County for this November general election,” Richer said.

People not excepting the results of the election is a concern, Richer said. It has clouded the last two years and has colored the conversation where it has been difficult to discuss how to improve the process without rehashing old debates, according to Richer.

“At 8 p.m. on election night, we will immediately release all of the ballots that we have received by Saturday before Tuesday election day,” Richer said.

This is because there has been a chance to scan them and make sure that there was only one vote for a particular person. The signatures will have been verified and they will be sent to bipartisan teams and then to tabulation.

The memory drives of the tabulation machine a person will put their ballot in if they decide to vote in-person on election day will be sent back to the main facility in central Phoenix. They are uploaded as the night progresses.

“So if you vote in-person on election day, your results will be made clear starting 9 p.m., 10 p.m., 11 p.m., on election night,” Richer said.

Results may completely shift in the morning because results are still being tabulated, and early ballots in the green packets that are dropped off on election day will be the tail votes counted in the following days, according to Richer.

“Some people want to hold onto their ballot until the bitter end; they all count, it’s just a matter of when they count,” Richer said.