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Why does AZ take so long to count its ballots? It's the way things are set up. If you sign up for and receive your early ballot, you can vote right away and drop your ballot in any mail box. (It's in two envelopes. You sign the inner one and hide that in the outer mailing envelope.) Or you can take it to any early voting site and drop it off there. Or you go to any special box set up across the state for ballots only (these were the ones where unpleasant folk were trying to intimidate people early on, till they got chased off by the law after a few days). Or you could wait till the last minute and turn them in on election day at any polling place.
If your early ballot gets sent in early, they leisurely check your signature on the (inner) envelope against the one one file. Then they open it, glance at it to see you didn't vote for too many candidates in the same race, mark their records to show you voted, then toss the envelope and put your ballot in a stack with the rest of the valid ballots, where it's anonymous. (If you did accidently screw up and mess your ballot, and they find it, they can call you and get a you new one if it's early enough.) They put the early approved ballots through the counting machine the day before the official election day and careful save them. If you vote on election day you put your own ballot directly in the counter. But they keep checking signatures at a leisurely pace. So if your ballot arrived in the mail the last week or you turned in your early ballot otherwise any time during the last week or on election day, it's likely it still hasn't been checked for signature the day after the election. So people being people, about a third of all ballots aren't checked for signatures by the day after the election. And then the process drags on and on. The Republicans proved the system works by challenging it after Trump's loss here. But, God, it's slow!
It's likely the highest profile offices (Senator, Governor and Secretary of State) have all gone to Democrats this time. Perhaps the State Senate has gone Democratic for the first time in 30 years. But we won't know probably for sure for another week. (They only publicly update the count twice a day, now.)
If your early ballot gets sent in early, they leisurely check your signature on the (inner) envelope against the one one file. Then they open it, glance at it to see you didn't vote for too many candidates in the same race, mark their records to show you voted, then toss the envelope and put your ballot in a stack with the rest of the valid ballots, where it's anonymous. (If you did accidently screw up and mess your ballot, and they find it, they can call you and get a you new one if it's early enough.) They put the early approved ballots through the counting machine the day before the official election day and careful save them. If you vote on election day you put your own ballot directly in the counter. But they keep checking signatures at a leisurely pace. So if your ballot arrived in the mail the last week or you turned in your early ballot otherwise any time during the last week or on election day, it's likely it still hasn't been checked for signature the day after the election. So people being people, about a third of all ballots aren't checked for signatures by the day after the election. And then the process drags on and on. The Republicans proved the system works by challenging it after Trump's loss here. But, God, it's slow!
It's likely the highest profile offices (Senator, Governor and Secretary of State) have all gone to Democrats this time. Perhaps the State Senate has gone Democratic for the first time in 30 years. But we won't know probably for sure for another week. (They only publicly update the count twice a day, now.)