Arizona enlists county employees to help tackle a surge of 2-page early ballots

PHOENIX — Workers for Arizona’s most populous county are pulling extra shifts to help election workers with a 24-hour operation to process early ballots that are a major problem. unusually long two pages.

Election officials in Maricopa County must verify each voter’s signature on early ballot envelopes and then remove the ballot pages so they can be prepared for the actual count. The province was unsure how long it would need to maintain the 24-hour operation, which started Thursday evening.

“As predicted, the first two-page ballot since 2006 has impacted election administration, especially the hard-working bipartisan boards that separate ballot pages from certified envelopes,” said Jennifer Liewer, Maricopa County deputy elections director for communications.

“In addition to the election workers already employed, county employees are also stepping up to assist with the process,” she said

Liewer said early Thursday evening that the number of people helping will fluctuate as they are trained, but that eventually between 150 and 200 people are expected to be deployed for the additional services.

“The county employees who assist with the night shifts are doing so outside of their normal work responsibilities,” she said. “We also utilize members of the Maricopa County Public Health Medical Reserve Corps.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said earlier this week that ballots had been received from 1 million voters, a number approaching 40% of the nearly 2.6 million registered people.

Election officials in the presidential battleground state have urged people to vote early, or make a plan if they choose to cast their ballot in person on Election Day, Tuesday.

Early votingespecially by mail, has long been popular in Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters submitted their ballots before Election Day in 2020, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Arizona was the first of the presidential battlegrounds to open early in-person voting sites on October 9, with a spread of traditional voting centers.

Voters who have received their ballot by mail can also deliver it in person at polling stations or in a mailbox.

Mail-in ballots in Maricopa County that arrive after Friday or are dropped off at the polls are generally not tabulated until after Election Day, a fact that means it often takes more than a week for the results of tight races to be known are.

Arizona has 4.36 million registered voters as of the Oct. 7 deadline to vote in next week’s election, according to a recent count released by the Secretary of State’s Office.

Many counties outside of Maricopa will also use a two-page ballot. The exact length will vary even within one county because the ballots include local contests.

Election officials in counties around the state have warned of possible delays at polling places. Maricopa County officials have said vote counting machines could jam if both pages of the ballot are not fed separately into the local tabulation machine.

The ballot in Maricopa County alone will include an average of 79 contests for local, state and federal races, as well as statewide ballot propositions.