Counting Ballots

The first results – posted at 8:00 PM on Election Night – will contain all early ballots that already tabulated. Typically, this includes all ballots that we’ve received by the Friday before Election Day Tuesday. This will include voters who mail their ballot seven days prior to Election Day back, drop off a ballot by Saturday, or if voting in person, do so by Friday.

On Election Day, Maricopa County Voters feed their ballots to an on-site tabulator at a Vote Center. This is only an option for voters who get in line, check-in, present identification, get a new ballot printed, and fill out the ballot at the voting location. Once done filling out their ballots, voters can feed the ballots directly into the mini-tabulators at the voting location.

After polls have closed, and all voters have left the voting location, bipartisan county employees remove the memory drives from the mini-tabulators and put them in tamper-proof packages to be securely transported. At the central election facility, election workers verify the security of the memory drives and then load the results from the memory drives into the election server that aggregates all results.

As more memory drives return from voting locations, more results are added to the server, and more results are released to the public.These in-person Election Day voters typically make up 10-15% of the total vote.

The remaining ballots are the early ballots returned in their green envelope on Election Day, or on the Monday or Sunday before Election Day.   They are often referred to as “late earlies.” Though these early ballots don’t arrive early, they are still valid votes if they return by 7:00 PM on Election Day.  

Before “late earlies” can be tabulated, elections workers must:

Scan the barcode on the return envelope to make sure the ballot comes from a valid voter who hasn’t already voted
Verify the voter’s signature on the return envelope
Give the envelope to a bipartisan team to extract the ballot by hand
Ensure the ballot is not damaged 

The ballot may then be sent for tabulation.