All eyes are on Maricopa County as Election Day arrives

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In the final press conference by Maricopa County before Election Day, officials stressed the importance of trusted sources and patience as the state and county once again take center stage in a divisive election.

"People should remember that there will still be long lines on Election Day," Assistant County Manager Zach Shira told a room of national and international press Monday. "This is normal for a presidential election."

The county is anticipating long lines due in part to the two-page ballot all voters will have to cast this election, the first time ballots have spilled onto a second sheet of paper since 2006. The average ballot contains 79 races and there are more than 13,000 different ballot styles across the county due to the different local races, bond issues and propositions.

Long lines and delays in making election results available have become fodder for election conspiracy theorists, who have clung onto those issues as a way to try to delegitimize the election outcome.

As voter turnout has increased in Arizona, so has a national focus on Maricopa County, which has been at the forefront of election fraud conspiracy theories , and has had a number of high profile candidates who have made national and international headlines for promoting false claims.

Arizona's new status as a swing state has also led to increased attention from political campaigns and news media across the country. Maricopa County spokesman Fields Moseley noted Monday that the county had issued more than 650 press credentials.

Monday's press conference focused on the numbers involved in making Maricopa's election work, as well as preliminary information on issues that have already been seized upon by conspiracy theorists and nation-state disinformation actors.

"We will not be playing Whac-a-Mole," Schira said of how the county plans to address misinformation. He said the county intends to focus solely on issues that would impact a voter's ability to vote and not every false claim that arises in the coming days.

Over the weekend, a video purporting to be a whistleblower within the Arizona Secretary of State's Office was flagged as Russian propaganda ; the person in the video made a number of false claims before encouraging people to protest. Other disinformation has already begun spreading about a voter database glitch that impacts approximately 218,000 voters.

Maricopa County Sheriff Russ Skinner said his office is on "high alert" for threats against election officials and election workers in the coming days, reiterating his "zero tolerance" for criminal activity that he spoke to last week

County officials also took the time to address those who have sown doubt directly.

"We are asking them to accept these results and move on and congratulate the winner," Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates said, alluding to candidates like Republicans Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh, who have yet to concede their 2022 losses and have continued to use the courts to overturn the will of the voters.

Election results will start to roll in Tuesday night, but many races may not be able to be called until Wednesday, when late-arriving early ballots begin to be counted, the county stressed. While a vast majority of votes have already been counted, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer stressed the volume of work that has been taken on.

With the two-page ballot, work has doubled, leading to shifts that go through the night and into the next morning. Richer said he and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes worked one of those shifts just recently, calling it "democracy after dark."

But doubling the work needed to tally votes isn't the only issue impacting election workers.

On the Oct. 7 deadline for voters to register in the state, Maricopa County received over 90,000 registrants — some registration forms were delivered in "trash bags," Richer said. His office has been undertaking verifying those registrations, some of which were tied to a group run by a Mesa city councilman that is now under investigation in Pennsylvania

Prosecutors in Pennsylvania are investigating irregular voter registration signatures tied to Field Media Corps run by Mesa Vice Mayor Francisco Heredia. His group has also been the subject of complaints in Arizona in 2023 and the Arizona Attorney General's Office confirmed to the Arizona Republic that two complaints from Mohave and Navajo Counties have been sent to Maricopa County prosecutors.

Richer said his office has "admonished" the group in the past, and that his office has spoken with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office about the group.

He stressed that his office is undergoing robust signature verification on early ballots, noting that they have hired additional people to assist, to ensure the integrity of the election.

Almost 1.2 million voters have already had their ballots processed and sent to tabulation, according to Richer. When election results are released at 8 p.m. on election night, he said approximately 55% of all the expected votes will have been tabulated. But those initial results will change as Election Day ballot tallies from polling sites are downloaded from tabulators and early ballots that either arrived Monday or Tuesday or were dropped off at polling sites are processed, something that takes several days to complete.

"Despite what has been alleged in previous elections, there will not be a point where we stop tabulating," Schira said. In 2020, election fraud conspiracy theorists claimed that Maricopa and other jurisdictions stopped counting over the night and "injected" votes for Democratic candidates in the meantime. There is no evidence of this occurring.

In light of these claims and misinformation, the county has created a new blog that will be regularly updated with information on vote counts as well as explaining how the process works. County officials stressed that voters and the media check trusted sources for information regarding the election including sites like the county's "Just the Facts" page.

"We are asking for people's patience," Gates said. "We will always pick accuracy over speed."

The county said they anticipate holding daily press conferences in the coming days as ballots are tabulated and results come in.