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Election Results: When will Arizona’s ballots be counted by?

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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.

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Report: Beijing’s military hacked U.S. nuclear firm before Hunter Biden aided Chinese bid to acquire it

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A bombshell report by Just the News explains that “U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America’s premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts.”

Hunter Biden attempted to assist CEFC China Energy to acquire Westinghouse, one of America’s most famous electricity and appliance brands, as well as its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor.

Hunter began his work with the Chinese company in early 2016 – while Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President – memos show. According to a copy of the indictment, just 20 months earlier, his father’s Justice Department charged five members of a Chinese military hacking unit for breaching the company’s computer systems in search of intellectual property and internal strategy communications.

Just the News reports:

In May 2014, the five operatives of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 were charged with hacking into the systems of six U.S.-based companies across different industrial sectors, including Westinghouse Electric Co., SolarWorld, United States Steel Corp., and a union. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called the breach a classic case of “economic espionage.”

One operative gained access to Westinghouse’s computers in 2010 and “stole proprietary and confidential technical and design specifications related to pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing” pertaining to the company’s advanced AP1000 nuclear reactor design, according to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice.

“Among other things, such specifications would enable a competitor to build a plant similar to the AP1000 without incurring significant research and development costs associated with designing similar pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing systems,” the indictment reads.

Just the News notes that while there is no evidence at the moment that Hunter Biden was aware of or involved in the hacking efforts by the Chinese, documents previously released by Congress in the Biden impeachment inquiry show Hunter Biden wrote in one text message in 2017 that he believed one of the CEFC officials he worked with, Patrick Ho, was the “f—ing spy chief” of China.

Ho was later indicted in the U.S. and charged with corruption. Joe Biden’s brother James told the FBI he believed CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming had a relationship with China’s communist president.

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