• Slug: Counting Ballots. 560 words.
• File photo (thumbnail, caption below).

By Eddie McCoven
Special for Cronkite News

PHOENIX – With more than 2.4 million registered voters in Maricopa County and the increasing number of allegations around election integrity, counting ballots for the 2024 presidential election is no easy task.

Maricopa County Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer said the county goes to “extensive lengths” to make sure all legal votes are counted.

“Our systems, our personnel, our workers are all trained to ensure that we do not disenfranchise voters,” Liewer said. “We want you to know that if you are a legally registered voter in Maricopa County, that your ballot will be cast.”

Maintaining transparency

The county provides detailed information about the ballot counting process at elections.maricopa.gov, including videos explaining each step. The website features 24/7 livestreamed webcam feeds of the county’s ballot tabulation areas. Public tours of the elections center are also available.

During a recent tour, Elections Director Scott Jarrett said Maricopa County has the second largest number of registered voters of any U.S. county. Jarrett also said officials expect about half of the ballots cast will be by mail, which are counted in the days before and after the election.

Vote-counting systems

At each of the county’s vote centers, voters will feed their completed ballot into a tabulation machine, which records the data on secured memory cards. These machines are not connected to the internet.

The paper ballots are deposited into a locked box automatically after the ballot is scanned.

When the polling location is closed, a pair of county election workers — one Democrat and one Republican — will take the memory cards to the county elections office in a secured envelope. The data is then transferred from the memory cards to the server.

Maricopa County’s election tabulating machines and computers at the County Election Center are on an internal server that is not connected to the internet. This secured location is where mail-in ballots are counted by machines. It’s also where signature verifications for mail-in ballots take place, which are done by pairs of election workers — one Democrat and one Republican.

Elections staff

While much of the process is electronic, county elections staff also play a big role to ensure ballots are counted accurately. The county hires about 4,500 temporary election workers for the November election who undergo background checks before hire and thorough training.

The general election ballot features nearly 80 contests on two pages. The last time Maricopa County voters had a ballot longer than one page was in 2006. Jarrett said because of this, the county has secured some bigger locations for vote centers and will have more voting booths set up to accommodate what will likely be a longer time frame needed to fill out the ballot.

Reporting the results

At 8 p.m. on election night, the county will release the initial results, Jarrett said. Those results are from ballots received and counted by the Friday before Election Day. Throughout the night, the results will be updated as the elections office receives the memory cards from voting centers, Jarrett said.

In the days following the election, results from ballots received over the weekend before Election Day and ballots that were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day. In 2022, the county finished counting the midterm election ballots in 13 days, the same number the county expects the counting to take for the presidential election, Jarrett said.

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