An election ballot dropbox is shown outside Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in downtown Phoenix on Sept. 25, 2020. /Photo by Brandon Quester/AZCIR
By Sam Kmack | Arizona Center for Investigstive Reporting
Election officials didn’t count 27,327 ballots cast by Arizona voters in the November election, rejecting more than twice the 10,457 votes that flipped the state for President-elect Joe Biden in what was the closest raw vote margin of any state in the nation.
The uncounted votes, which are rejected by election officials for reasons such as a missing signature, don’t indicate fraud or election irregularities. They show that Arizona’s election system worked as intended: Voters who were eligible to vote and followed state laws had their ballots counted.
But election experts said some of those laws can make it harder for Arizona voters to cast a ballot and have it counted, in part because of the state’s registration deadline – nearly a month before Election Day – and by not giving voters extra time to correct a missing signature. Adding to these barriers are county-level policies that, because of limited resources in areas such as Apache County, can increase the scenarios in which voters have their ballots thrown out, according to AZCIR interviews with experts, election officials and a review of county-by-county rejected ballot data.
