PHOENIX — Arizona's midterm election could stretch past Election Day, all the way into the New Year.
The reason? A new state law opens the door to more automatic ballot recounts.
"It increased the likelihood that automatic recounts would happen," Jarrett told reporters at an elections briefing last week.
"Not only that they'll happen on a single contest, but it could be many contests on the same ballot."
Several elections on the 2022 ballot are expected to be close, as are the votes on some of the 10 ballot propositions.
If the law had been in place in 2020, the hotly contested presidential election would have gone to an automatic recount, along with four other races.
Here's what we know:
Law grew out of Trump's defeat
The law grew out of Donald Trump's narrow loss to Joe Biden in Arizona's 2020 presidential vote.
Republican State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita's legislation lowered the threshold for an automatic ballot recount.
In 2020, the threshold depended on the election: a victory margin of either one-tenth of a percentage point, or 10 to 200 votes, whichever number was lower.
The new law lowers the threshold and makes it uniform: an automatic recount is required if the victory margin is less than or equal to 0.50 percent of all ballots cast in an election or for a ballot proposition.
It just so happens that Joe Biden won statewide over Donald Trump by 10,500 votes - a margin of 0.30 percent of all ballots cast.
Planning workers' holiday schedules
Elections officials statewide have been aware of the law for several months.
Recounts mean they'll have to spend more money if election season is extended.
Maricopa County is preparing to have workers in place past Thanksgiving and into the Christmas holidays, Jarrett said.
'Automatic' doesn't mean fast
But "automatic" doesn't mean the recount process would be fast.
Jarrett provided a rough timeline:
The recount process wouldn't commence until the secretary of state's election canvass is done on Dec. 5.
The officer overseeing a given election - not the candidate - would have to ask a court to initiate the recount.
Then the pre-election preparations would begin all over again. Tabulating machines would again be tested for logic and accuracy, possibly in all 15 of the state's counties if the recount were for a statewide election. That could be done by mid-December, Jarrett said.
Daily tabulations from the automatic recount would not be made public until the results were unsealed by the court.
But there's more: Maricopa County would also do a hand count of 2 percent of the ballots in the recount, which is required under state law.
What recount means for results
None of this precludes the possibility of the Republican election deniers on the ballot contesting an election defeat.
But if there's a recount in the U.S. Senate race, between Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, we might not find out which party controls the chamber until well past Nov. 8.
Keep in mind that the winners of the top statewide offices will be inaugurated in early January.
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Decision 2022
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