Arizona Election Results 2012: Votes Finally Counted, But Many Call For Reform to Ballot-Counting Measures

Roughly two weeks after the Nov. 6 election, all ballots in Arizona's election have finally been counted-but that doesn't mean that critics of the state's ballot-counting process are staying silent about demanding the state change its vote tallying system.

Results announced on election night or just afterwards were unchanged, the New York Times reports, although the three Congressional races-all won by Democrats-were decided several days after the Nov. 6 election. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was still projected as the winner in Maricopa County's election for sheriff, beating out Democratic candidate Paul Penzone.

Ballot counts ended on Wednesday after officials allowed the state's most populous counties - Maricopa, which encompasses Phoenix, and Pima, which includes Tucson -to extend their counts past last Friday's deadline in order to finish tens of thousands of provisional ballots cast in both counties.

Election officials have pointed the cause for the delay in ballot counting to a swarm of thousands of early mail-in ballots that came in a few days before the election, according to the Los Angeles Times. Maricopa County recorder's officials received roughly 200,000 early mail-in ballots just on Nov. 6. And across the state, more than 600,000 ballots out of about 2.2 million ballots were left uncounted on Election Day.

Yet, Democrats and Latino advocacy groups were not content with that answer. Some Democrats have called for a bipartisan investigation to examine the issues raised by voters and campaigns, including problems that mail-in voters experienced in telling the difference between sample ballots and real ones as well as the fragmentation of the election process.

"We need the process to be better explained to voters, especially because we had so many new voters registered ahead of the election," Luis Heredia, the executive director of Arizona's Democratic Party, told the New York Times.

State House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, told the Arizona Republic earlier this week that he planned to introduce legislation creating a bipartisan commission to examine the 2012, 2010 and 2008 elections.

"Arizonans deserve real answers about what happened during this election," Campbell said in a written statement. "We need to know what caused the irregularities."

In Maricopa County, which has roughly 60 percent of all registered Arizona voters, 115,000 votes were cast through provisional ballots, a 15 percent increase from 2008, based on state records examined by the New York Times. Approximately 59,000 people who requested early ballots also went to the polls on Nov. 6, accounting for almost half of all provisional ballots cast.

Latino voters experienced their fair share of problems in Maricopa County, where there was a push to get more Hispanics out to the polls. Leaflets written in Spanish reaching out to Latino voters listed the wrong date for the election. And according to complaints logged by grass-roots groups geared towards turning out Hispanic voters, many were first-time voters who signed up to get their ballots by mail and claimed not to have received them.

"It creates this sense of illegitimacy," Rodolfo Espino, assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University, told the Los Angeles Times. "It could be something really innocent going on here, or something really egregious going on here. Regardless, it's a problem that needs to be addressed."

Another problem that advocates say faces Latino voters. Petra Falcón, executive director of Promise Arizona, a coalition that claimed to have registered almost 35,000 voters this year, said that they received complaints that language barriers hindered Spanish-speaking voters in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods from understanding poll workers.

"We need certain skill sets to address the changing electorate, and one of them is language," Ms. Falcón told the New York Times.

Regarding the state's election system, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett told the New York Times that "the system is not broken," saying that the amount of time it took to count the ballots this year was the same as it was during the 2008 election. However, Bennett recognized that the state could do better.

"Speed is not our No. 1 goal. Accuracy is our No. 1 goal. But that doesn't mean we can't think of a way to speed up the process," Mr. Bennett said.