The 2018 U.S. Senate Elections are Coming: New Batches of Voters Are Counting in Maricopa and Washoe

It is not clear when the Senate contests in Arizona and Nevada will be called, even though new batches of votes were reported late Thursday in those states.

By the numbers, Maricopa County experienced a record number of these ballots. On Election Day itself, more than 290,000 voters dropped a ballot off at a polling location as opposed to voting in person or mailing it in. That is 100,000 more than in 2020, which held the most recent record.

In Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous, there were about 10,000 ballots counted on Friday, and CNN estimates there are roughly 12,000 remaining.

In Arizona voters have three ways to vote: mail in, drop off and in person. Voters can turn in their ballot on election day.

The law requires all mail in and drop off ballot to be individually signature verified, according to election officials. The bipartisan processing board is where the ballots have to go in order to be checked. Once that’s complete, it goes into tabulation.

Among those taking aim at Arizona’s elections management are Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, and Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state. The lie that the 2020 election was stolen was echoed by both Lake and Finchem.

Why do people around me are slow-rolling this?” Gates told the Associated Press at the Kari Lake Center on Sept. 11, 2020

At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”

In 2020, the protest at the vote counting center led to more precautions this year. Though few protesters have come by the center, Gates told reporters threats have continued for members of the elections board.

“It’s now a way of life for me and my colleagues,” he said. It shouldn’t be a thing for everyone, but it is now a way of life.

I would have them just stop and think about my grandpa. My grandpa was a World War II veteran who was in Europe,” Gates said. “He was not fighting for their right to pick up a phone or type in a text threatening someone’s life. He was trying to make sure that all of us had the right to vote and pick our own leaders. So my grandpa would not be cool with that.”

Delaying 2020 midterm elections: The case of Joe Biden and his Democratic gubernatorial rival, Alexis Colbert-Masters

The control of the House remains up in the air with 21 races still uncalled. Democrats have won 203 seats so far, while Republicans have won 211 (218 seats are needed to control the House), according to CNN projections. California has many uncalled House races.

Regardless of the ultimate makeup of both chambers next year, Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance has prompted a backlash against House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, while a handful of Senate Republicans are calling for a delay in next week’s scheduled leadership elections.

It takes so long to count the votes because the way that each state handles the non-polling day ballots outside of those cast at the polls is the main reason.

When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. The news organizations waited until the Saturday after the election day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner, as mail-in voting jumped due to the swine flu.

The Senate contest between incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt were among the key races in the Silver State that have not been called.

“We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.

Elections officials in Maricopa County debunked false claims circulating on right-wing social media suggesting that a woman wearing glasses in the county’s counting facility livestream was Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee and current secretary of state.

After winning his primary, Masters scrubbed the language from his website which included a false claim that the election was stolen. Under questioning from the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote counting or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. In that debate and on the trail, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.

The Arizonan House of Representatives, Tammy Patrick, and the Progress of Voting in the Presence of Election Day Violation and Disqualification

State law in Nevada allows mail in ballots to be received until Saturday if they’re postmarked by Election Day. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.

About two thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received were late and disqualified, according to Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes.

Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.

The Chair of the House Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy. He didn’t say if McCarthy has his support for speaker, but the meeting went well.

Several key House races are still undecided and could head into recounts. One such race is in Colorado, where GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was ahead by just 1,122 votes as of 9 a.m. ET Friday. The votes are still being counted.

Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County election official, mostly as a federal compliance officer. Half of the state’s voters live in Maricopa, the home of Phoenix.

Patrick says the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona haven’t changed a lot since her time there. She says voter behavior and political realities are true.

Patrick thinks that voters might have heard that voting in the mail is better than waiting in a line, and that would have made them vote in the mail.

Patrick says one thing that could speed up this process is an “extraction” machine. Many counties in Florida, in particular, use an inhouse device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, which makes it much easier to remove the ballot.

She says that the political significance of key races in Arizona is one reason why the state is under this kind of scrutiny. The media doesn’t feel as comfortable calling the race and that’s what makes it seem like this is taking much longer.

The Democrat leads the Republican by more than 300,000 votes in the Arizona governor’s race as of early Saturday morning, after the reporting of 80,000 ballots in the most populous county in the state. Republican AdamLaxalt holds onto a slim lead of just more than 800 votes over his Democratic opponent, CatherineCortez Masto.

If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats are projected to take control of the Senate. If she loses, the fate of the upper house will be decided in December’s Georgia runoff.

Arizona’s hand count audit is not coming to an end: a lawsuit by a county attorney representing Cochise County Recorder David Stevens

“Curing” is a process in which voters correct problems with their mail ballot, ensuring that it gets counted. This can mean validating that a ballot is truly from them by adding a missing signature, or by addressing signature-match issues. The deadline for voters to cure their ballots is the 14th of November.

Gates said on CNN that he would prefer that Republicans communicate the concerns they have about him directly to him. I am a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. Raise these issues with us and discuss them with us, as opposed to making these baseless claims,” he said.

Masters also accused the county of mixing up uncounted ballots with ballots that had already been counted. The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona said in a statement that the election has exposed flaws in the county’s election administration. An accurate and prompt announcement of election results that can be accepted by all voters is what Arizona deserves.

On Friday night, the RNC and the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted a statement criticizing the county’s process, and demanding that it require “around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing” until all of the votes are counted, along with “regular, accurate public updates.” The groups also threatened that they would “not hesitate to take legal action if necessary.”

It takes between 10 to 12 days to complete the count over the past couple of decades. That is not because the county decided to do something. Because of how the law is set up in Arizona, we follow the law and make sure the count is accurate.

After suffering setbacks in court, Arizona officials who have sought to conduct a hand count audit of a rural county’s election results are considering a scaled-down version of their plan that could still inject chaos and delay into the process of certifying the state’s results.

On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. But a lawyer for Cochise County Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.

After Masters, Lombardo, and Sisolak: A reversal of fortune for Republicans in Nevada during the Covid-19 crisis

According to CNN, Trump is trying to blame McConnell for the failures of several candidates who were endorsed by him, and he’s going to start campaigning against McConnell next week.

The string of Democratic wins Friday night marked a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that had appeared to be in serious trouble heading into Tuesday’s elections. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto were laboring under President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, an unfavorable economic climate – with inflation and high gas prices pinching the budgets of families all across the country – and facing historical trends that tend to lead to steep losses in the first midterm cycle of a new president.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn abortion rights angered many voters across the country, and is one of the different crosscurrents affecting voter behavior. Republicans were also hamstrung by Trump’s decision to boost far-right candidates who were loyal to him, but often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide elections. In the end, many independent voters and moderates appear to have rejected candidates they viewed as too extreme or too closely aligned with Trump – and Democrats turned out in droves to protect their incumbent candidates.

Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, swooped into the state in the final days of the election, warning that the very fate of the nation’s democracy was on the ballot. Voters in the Grand Canyon State elected a new chief elections official, who rejected the candidacy of a strident election denier backed by Trump. Instead, they will elect Democrat Adrian Fontes as Arizona’s next secretary of state, CNN projected Friday night.

The one bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor – tossing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. During the Covid-19 epidemic, when unemployment inNevada had peaked at nearly 30%, the Clark County sheriff reminded voters of their struggles. Though the economy has rebounded, Lombardo had argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and had hampered the state’s economic recovery.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/politics/mark-kelly-blake-masters-arizona-senate-results/index.html

Maricopa County Election Supervisor Bill Masters, A Republican Candidate who Decided to Go Stronger on Election Denialism and the 2020 Presidential Election

A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”

“Because ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and reconcile the total ballots against check-ins to ensure it matches. This has been done for decades with political party observers present, the spokesman said.

Bill Gates, the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, rejected Masters’ suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting over again, stating that “is simply not allowed for under Arizona law.” The pace of ballot counting is the same as in previous years, Gates said.

“Let the count continue on and at the end, if they have issues they choose to take to court, they have every right to do that, and we’ll let that process play through,” Gates added.

The 2020 cycle would be challenging for Democrats, even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won, because of Kelly’s unique personal brand as a retired Navy Veteran, an ex-astrobatic and the husband of a former congressman.

Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He said he believed Trump would win the 2020 presidential election in a campaign video released last year.

But Masters seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told CNN’s Lah he didn’t believe moderates were bothered by his comments about the 2020 election, insisting that voters were far more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border.

Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal that was advanced by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The bill does not include exceptions for rape and incest.

Election Day, Election Weekend, and the Status of the U.S. Mailing List: What are We Still Saying About Election Day?

It’s Saturday, and election workers are still tallying the votes in pivotal races across the country. As Election Day turns into Election Weekend, here is what to know.

The Republican Party of Arizona, the Republican National Committee, and Masters criticized the tabulation process.

Clark County, Nevada, which is Nevada’s most populous and includes Las Vegas, will release results from their remaining 22,000 mail ballots tonight.

He predicted that the results could be released between 2 and 3 o’clock tonight, but said that this could happen as early as 7 pm.