Vote Count In Maricopa County To Resume Thursday Morning
About 160,000 early and provisional ballots still have yet to be tabulated in Maricopa County. Election officials will start counting again Thursday morning and hope to have them done by the middle to end of next week.
Maricopa County estimates between 35,000 and 40,000 people cast a provisional ballot yesterday. That's far less than the 100,000 or so provisionals cast in the 2012 general election. County Recorder Helen Purcell attributes some of the drop to better voter education about the importance of voting and mailing in an early ballot on time.
And she said even though about 120,000 early ballots were dropped off in person Tuesday, "that's still an early ballot that we got back that was not voted at all," Purcell said. "At least in my way of thinking, since we are down so much in the provisionals, a big part of our provisionals in 2012 were people who had gotten an early ballot and didn’t vote it."
Maricopa County had new technology in place Tuesday that guided voters to their correct polling place if they showed up at the wrong one, which Purcell said also helped cut down on provisional ballots.
