Arizona's Maricopa County is a sprawling expanse of desert and stucco houses with the state's biggest cities. It's 4.5 million people make it larger than more than half the states in the country. And it's home to 60% of Arizona's residents.
The cities of Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe play a large role in statewide elections. Where the mass of voters in the interior of the state vote Republican, the cities have become blue islands in the red wash.
Arizona was, at one time, a reliably red state. But the state's changing demographics, the result of an influx of residents from northern states attracted to Arizona sunshine and businesses attracted by the state's low taxes, changed the political character of the state. It's now a toss-up state, and both parties are fighting tooth and nail because whoever wins Maricopa County wins Arizona and its 11 electoral votes.
One more thing about Maricopa County: because it's so large and populous and because of rules passed by previous Republican legislatures, it will probably take up to 13 days to count all the votes. This means that we may have to wait a long while to know who won the 2024 presidential election.
Why 13 days?
This election, voters are casting an extra-long two-page ballot that takes longer to tabulate, so it could take up to 13 days before they finish counting, Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer said. The timeline is similar to the number of days it has taken in recent elections to complete the count. Associated Press research found it took 13 days for Maricopa County to finish counting in the 2018 general election, 11 days in 2020 and 13 days in the 2022 midterms.
Arizona’s mail voting law also drags out the count. It allows voters to return mail ballots by the close of polls on Election Day. In 2022, 293,000 voters — representing one-fifth the total vote in Maricopa — dropped off their mail ballots on Election Day.
Mail ballots take longer to count because, before they can be tallied, the envelopes must be scanned, the ballots sorted and the voters’ signatures inspected to ensure they’re legitimate. Some states like Florida require all mail ballots to be in before Election Day so this process is over when the polls close. Because of Arizona law, when Maricopa’s polls close it’s just beginning.
Los Angeles County in California is also a huge county. Maricopa reports actual votes far faster than L.A. County, but because the overwhelming number of votes are Democratic, the races there can be called quickly.
Another reason for the long count is that a small number of ballots are allowed to be "cured" — voters are allowed to fix a ballot that's questioned — and that can take up to five days. The law is a holdover from a time when most Westerners cast their ballots by mail due to the distances involved and the lack of roads that made travel difficult.
The historically long count has led to a bevy of charges by Donald Trump and his supporters that the vote count was rigged. County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who defended the accuracy of the county’s election results, had his life and family threatened.
Richer says the reason some Republicans remain skeptical of the way elections work in the county isn’t because there’s anything especially complicated or unusual in how it counts votes. It’s because Maricopa — located in a onetime reliably red state where Biden in 2020 defeated Trump by a margin of about 11,000 votes — may be the best place to undermine confidence in national elections.
Indeed, Trump, in a campaign appearance in the county in 2023 called the county’s Board of Supervisors, which shares election duties with the Recorder, the “most important” in the country.
The four Republicans on the board also rebuffed Trump’s pleas to overturn the election in 2020. Two are retiring after threats, and a Trump ally won the GOP primary to replace one of them. A third was ousted in a primary by another Trump supporter.
Getting rid of Republicans who wouldn't do Trump's bidding is not going to change the demographics of the county. And that means Maricopa County will remain a swing county not just for the presidential election but for down-ballot races as well.
