Elections
Election Results: When will Arizona’s ballots be counted by?
The unprecedented surge in absentee and mail-in ballots this election means that we won’t learn the full results likely for weeks after Election Day. But when will we know the full results by? A better question, rather, is when will each of the swing states’ full results be known by.
On Tuesday, I tackled the ballot situation in Pennsylvania, a contentious swing state which prohibits the counting of any ballots before the morning of Election Day. Arizona, on the other end of the policy spectrum, began counting ballots on Tuesday.
Check out this explanation about the difference between mail-in and absentee ballots here by Ben Wilson: The Difference Between Absentee and Mail-In Ballots.
RELATED: Election Results: When will Pennsylvania’s ballots be counted by?
Arizona, once Republican-red like its sunsets, has turned purple in recent years—like the sky at dusk. The Grand Canyon State now finds itself center stage in the most contentious presidential election in recent history, meaning that its results could be critical in deciding the winner of the election, the results of which have an outsized chance of being disputed this year.
Lucky for Arizona, the state has been a trailblazer when it comes to early voting. Due to their impressive system that they’ve built up over the decades, a majority of the state’s votes may be known on the night of November 3, assuming nothing derails the voting and counting process.
During the 2018 midterms, 79% of votes in the state were cast early, and that was before they allowed early ballots to be tallied before Election Day. They enacted that change after 2018 when it had taken a week to tally all the votes.
Along with new ballot-counting machines in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, votes this year are expected to be counted quite speedily. Local officials estimate that most of the results will be known by the end of Election Night, the New York Times reported. And, because the state’s seven million residents are overwhelmingly concentrated around Phoenix, where Maricopa is situated, the county comprises 60% of Arizona’s total population. Second place to Maricopa is Pima County, where Tucson is.
The Arizona Secretary of State will release the unofficial preliminary results at 8pm (Mountain Time), NBC News 12 Phoenix reports, but won’t be published until they’ve been verified.
As of Tuesday, since early voting began on October 7, election officials across the state have already received hundreds of thousands of early ballots, says News 12.
Pima County reports in its ballot turnover receipts that it has counted 156,459 ballots alone so far. Topping Pima, Maricopa has verified the signatures of over 600,000 received ballots, its department of elections tweeted.
At this rate, unless some unexpected political “haboob” strikes, Arizona’s results will be reported far sooner than many other states and sooner than most swing states.
Despite Las Vegas falling just over the border in neighboring Nevada, one could safely bet—relatively speaking—that most of Arizona’s results will be revealed on Election Night.
You can follow Douglas Braff on Twitter @Douglas_P_Braff.
After hours of debate, the House voted Wednesday night to approve a bipartisan debt-ceiling deal, taking a step toward averting a default on U.S. debt. The measure passed with 314 members voting in favor and 117 members voting in opposition. 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats voted to approve the bill, while 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voted against it.
National Review writes the measure’s passage secures “a victory for House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who managed to keep his caucus together despite a challenge from House Freedom Caucus members intent on securing greater spending concessions from the Biden White House.”
The bill will now head to the Senate. McCarthy said the measure is the “largest spending cut that Congress has ever voted for,” but faced opposition from members of his caucus who believe the deal “didn’t go far enough in restoring pre-Covid spending levels.”
In his speech on the House floor Wednesday before the vote, McCarthy pleaded with his colleagues to support what he had bargained for with Biden:
“They demanded a clean debt limit, which really means they spend more and you pay more in taxes. House Republicans said ‘no’,” McCarthy said.“Over the past four months, we fought hard to change how Washington works. We stopped the Democrats from writing a blank check after the largest spending binge in American history… The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the biggest spending cut in American history.”
National Review reports:
The agreement suspends the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt limit through January 1, 2025, and caps spending in the 2024 and 2025 budgets.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the deal will reduce budget deficits by about $1.5 trillion between 2023 and 2033. Director of the CBO Phillip Swagel projected that there would be reductions in discretionary outlays of $1.3 trillion over the 2024–2033 period. Mandatory spending would decrease by $10 billion, revenues would decrease by $2 billion over the same period, and the interest on the public debt would decline by $188 billion.
Biden warned of the consequences of default, saying what would follow would include an economic recession, devastated retirement accounts, and millions of jobs lost.
“I made clear from the start of negotiations that the only path forward was a bipartisan budget agreement,” explained Biden on Twitter. “No one got everything they wanted. But that’s the responsibility of governing.”
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