PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — The question of tipping the political scales in Arizona, like anyplace, is “purely mathematical,” Bruce Merrill said. More people voting for the other side matters only if enough of them vote to overcome the power of a loyal base of voters.
Dr. Merrill, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, has made a successful living dissecting and analyzing voting patterns and trends in the state and beyond. Along the way, he has helped more than 100 candidates, almost all of them Republican, use numbers to tailor their messages and assess the viability of their campaigns. He is used to addressing large forums; last month, he spoke before the Arizona Medical Association. On Tuesday, he opened the doors to his home here, a spectacular 14,000-square-foot house on the edge of a golf course, to talk to about 60 people about the Nov. 6 elections.
The New York Times reported the audience members listened attentively, as they do whenever they attend one of the salons that Thomas Houlon has organized here for 29 years, on subjects as varied as food, architecture, legal issues, quantum physics, medicine and the Chinese economy.
This year, his salon was supposed to be a discussion about the meaning of the election results, and it was, though not for local races. That is because, by Thursday, there were still 163,482 votes to be counted in the state before Friday’s deadline.
Provisional ballots, which make up the bulk of the uncounted votes, were cast by people who showed up at the polls only to find that their names were not on voter rolls, or who said they never got the ballots they had signed up to receive at home, or who had received absentee ballots but decided to vote at the polling place after all.
The lesson behind the record number of provisional ballots cast this year and the delay in tallying all of the votes, Merrill said, “is that we have to figure out a better way to run elections.”
