Arizona endures tense wait for final election result in last battleground

Arizona remained in a tense waiting game on Saturday for its election results, even as neighboring Nevada declared for Donald Trump overnight, giving the president-elect six out of seven swing states after election day on 5 November.

In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.

In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, the controversial Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.

The contested primary for the seat sprung from Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected in 2018 for the Democrats, switched to become an independent and then announced she wasn’t seeking re-election this year.

Other Arizona races remain close, including the sixth congressional district battle between incumbent Republican Juan Ciscomani and Democratic challenger Kirsten Engel, as the Democrats nationally wait to see if they can come from behind to flip control of the House of Representatives in Washington DC.

The delay reporting the races falls largely on Maricopa county, the fourth largest in the US, where the state capital, Phoenix, lies. The county on Friday evening reported 351,000 ballots yet to count. Some have not been through the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope. Officials expected ballot counting would continue for 10 to 13 days after election day.

The long process for counting ballots is in part explained by the lengthy two-page ballot itself with election workers taking nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat and check for damage, according to Votebeat.

In Cochise county, a mechanical problem with tabulators caused them to work more slowly.

According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, part of the state’s problem is “early-late” votes – early voting ballot papers that were filled in don’t get dropped off to be counted until election day itself.

“We have a substantial number of voters who take their early ballot and they kind of keep it on their kitchen counter for, like, three weeks,” state representative Alexander Kolodin told AZ Central.

Kolodin, a Republican, is considering a proposal that would require early ballots to be returned in advance of election day, giving time for election officials to go through the process of verification.

But amid heightened security in Arizona, with fears of violence, there has so far been no repeat of unrest over counting and long, drawn-out challenges that followed the 2020 election in Maricopa county – and no claims of election worker intimidation there.