WASHINGTON — Vote-counting machines at about a fifth of polling locations in Arizona’s most populous county could not read ballots cast in the midterm elections Tuesday morning, officials said.
“About 20% of the locations out there where there’s an issue with the tabulator where some of the ballots that after people have voted them, they try and run them through the tabulator and they’re not going through,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates said in a video posted to Facebook.
Long lines to vote were reported throughout the county early Tuesday as election officials at roughly 45 of the county’s 223 vote centers scrambled to make sense of the issue, Gates said.
“If there are long lines at the location you’re at, or issues with the tabulator, if you would prefer to go to another location, you can do that,” Gates said. “It doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you’re a registered voter here in Maricopa County.”
Voters may still cast their ballots at locations with defective machines Tuesday, but they will be placed in a “secure box” to be kept until they are taken to a central counting location in the evening, he said.
“This will function much like early voting functions, in that we would get your ballot back, once we’ve signature-verified it, we would send it to our central tabulators,” Gates said. “Ballots that are [at the central location] will already be signature-verified, so we won’t need to confirm identity but we will central-tabulate them.”
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“This is actually what the majority of Arizona counties do on Election Day all the time,” he added.
The county, which includes the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metropolitan area, had about 2,463,264 active voters as of Tuesday, according to the elections department. About 44,000 people had cast ballots in person by 11 a.m. ET Tuesday.
The issue is likely to delay the reporting of initial results Tuesday evening as the nation eyes Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s race to keep his seat against Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters.