As Arizona counts votes, Republicans seize on Election Day glitches

Hobbs, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter: “This election will be determined by the voters, not by the volume at which an unhinged former television reporter can shout conspiracy theories.”

On Tuesday, nearly a third of polling locations throughout Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and more than 60 percent of the state’s voters — had problems with the printers that produce ballots on demand for individual voters. Starting early Tuesday morning, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be properly read by vote-counting machines, causing the ballots to be rejected, according to county officials. These officials had previously said that a smaller number of sites had problems.

The officials said they had yet to determine the cause of the printer problems; they said the printers passed required logic and accuracy tests ahead of Tuesday and had been used during the August primary election and the 2020 elections with the same settings, with no problems.

Voters had the options of waiting for the problems to be fixed, going to different polling locations, or dropping their ballots into secure boxes that were transferred to downtown Phoenix and counted there. Voters placed about 17,000 ballots in the secure boxes, a higher number than in previous elections, county officials said. They said all votes will be counted, that all voters who wanted to cast a ballot were allowed to do so and that the printer problems will not affect the counting of votes.

Maricopa’s problems remained a mystery Thursday to officials in Washington, who have been disappointed since Election Day by the lack of a clear explanation communicated to both voters and the agencies charged with election oversight, said two people tracking the developments. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Kari Lake wants to upend how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted

In a state central to widespread conspiracy theories after President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, some Republicans leveraged the problems in Maricopa County to call for elimination of early voting and machines that count votes. Though early voting has long been popular in Arizona, ballots returned in the days leading up to Election Day and on Election Day, always take time to process, and ballots are processed in the order they are received. To post results more quickly, county leaders for weeks urged voters to return their ballots — which had more races than ever before — as quickly as possible.

Election workers were working through about 400,000 ballots in Maricopa County as of Thursday night. Officials here said they always expected the count to take as many as 12 days, though they had expected to report at least 95 percent of results by Friday. On Thursday, county officials said that it would take longer to meet that goal and that they are working through the Veterans Day federal holiday and the weekend.

As Arizona counts votes, Republicans seize on Election Day glitches