Arizona is hiring county employees to help handle a wave of 2-page early voting

PHOENIX — Employees for Arizona’s most populous county have been reassigned to help election workers with a round-the-clock operation to process early ballots that are unusually long two pages.

Maricopa County election officials must verify each voter’s signature on the early ballot envelopes and then remove the ballot pages so they can be prepared for the actual count. The county was not sure how long it would need to maintain the 24-hour operation, which began Thursday night.

“As predicted, the first two-page ballot in 2006 affected election administration, especially for the hard-working bipartisan boards that separate the ballot pages from the affidavit envelopes,” said Jennifer Liewer, Deputy Director for Maricopa County Election Communications.

“In addition to the election workers who are already hiring, county workers are stepping up to help the process,” she said. Her statement did not say how many workers were helping or from which departments they were drawn.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said earlier this week that ballots had been received from 1 million voters, approaching 40 percent of the nearly 2.6 million registered voters.

Election officials in the presidential battleground state urged people to vote early or make a plan if they choose to cast their ballots in person on Election Day, which is Tuesday.

Early voting, particularly by mail, has long been popular in Arizona, where nearly 80 percent of voters cast their ballots before Election Day in 2020, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Arizona was the first of the presidential battleground states to open in-person early voting sites on Oct. 9, with plenty of traditional polling places.

Voters who received their ballots by mail can also drop them off in person at polling places or in a drop box.

Mail-in ballots in Maricopa County that arrive after Friday or are dropped off at the polls generally won’t be tabulated until after Election Day, meaning it’s often more than a week before the results of close races are known .

Arizona has 4.36 million registered voters by the Oct. 7 deadline to vote in next week’s election, according to a recent tally released by the Secretary of State’s Office.

Many counties outside of Maricopa will also use a two-page ballot. The exact length will vary even within a single county because the ballots include local contests.

Election officials in counties around the state have warned of possible delays at polling stations. Maricopa County officials said the ballot counting machines could jam if both pages of the ballot are not fed separately into the on-site tabulation machine.

The Maricopa County ballot alone will have an average of 79 contests for local, state and federal races, as well as statewide ballot propositions.