As has already been detailed in diaries by ThatPoshGirl, Manyamile, and Biscobosco, there are still many uncounted ballots in Arizona, even though the Senate race has been called for Republican Jeff Flake over Democrat Richard Carmona and Carmona has conceded. ThatPoshGirl and Biscobosco also have new diaries that I would urge everyone to read regarding the effects of the uncounted and recently-counted ballots on the Arizona 2nd district House race.
Last night and earlier today, as reported in some of those previous diaries, we knew of 602,000 early and provisional ballots that have not yet been counted. ABC 15 news now reports that after adding the ballots from counties that had previously not reported their totals, there are 631,274 known uncounted early and provisional ballots. This includes "nearly 460,000" early votes, suggesting that there are more than 170,000 provisional ballots in total statewide.
An ABC 15 news PDF file previously posted by ThatPoshGirl shows that 115,000 of those provisional ballots are from Maricopa County, the home of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who himself is running for re-election against Democrat Paul Penzone and is currently leading by roughly 90,000 votes. Given that Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office have such a history of anti-Latino racism that they have been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for civil rights violations, it does not strike me as unreasonable to wonder if the high number of provisional ballots in Maricopa, many of which I have heard are from Latino-heavy areas of western Phoenix, resulted from inappropriate challenges against Latino voters. If so, the Maricopa provisional ballots may break quite heavily Democratic if and when they are counted. We do not have sufficient information to be sure of this yet, but it seems to me that we also do not have sufficient information to rule it out. Only a relatively small number of provisional ballots have been counted yet throughout the state, 3,553 according to the unofficial results linked from the Arizona Secretary of State's website, and for all we know they may not be representative of the vast number of others that remain.
With Carmona trailing by only roughly 80,000 votes, it seems to me unwise for him to have conceded until we know more about the early vote results and especially about the provisional ballots. Normally, as several people have pointed out, a concession has no binding effect on the result. But here, it may, because it may discourage some voters from taking the actions necessary to get their provisional ballots counted. So I was hoping someone might know how to get in touch with the Carmona campaign legal team or others high up in the campaign, and convince Carmona to retract his concession at least until the votes are counted. Follow me below the slightly tilted orange doodle for more details.
As I first noted in a comment that ThatPoshGirl was kind enough to incorporate into her diary, Arizona law requires certain voters who cast what are known as conditional provisional ballots to follow up by providing proper ID at their local county recorder's office.
The FAQ on provisional ballots from the Pima County Recorder's Office explains that if someone is issued a provisional ballot because they had no ID with them when they came to the polls, as opposed to inadequate ID, then they must bring proper ID to the county recorder's office by 5 business days after the election to have their vote counted:
I was required to vote a provisional ballot because I did not have ANY identification at the polls. What do I do now?
The identification requirement was introduced into Arizona law by a voter approved ballot initiative. If you had no form of acceptable identification, you must bring identification to the Recorder’s Office within the time limits of the statute. As a convenience to voters, the Recorder’s Office designates several locations within an election area as receiving locations for that identification. The poll workers should have provided you with a list of the required identification and of the receiving locations at the time you finished your provisional ballot. For most elections, the deadline for presenting that identification is 5:00 p.m. on the Friday following election day. For the November election cycles in even numbered years, the deadline is 5:00 p.m. on the 5th business day after election day. That may be either the Tuesday or the Wednesday of the week after election day depending on when the Veteran’s Day holiday falls. If you do not present the proper identification by that deadline, the law requires that your ballot be rejected.
If voters who cast such a conditional provisional ballot think that the only races in their area have been decided, they may not bother showing up to validate their provisional ballot in this way. While I have heard suggestions from people in the Carmona campaign and the Arizona state Democratic party that relatively few of the provisional ballots are conditional, I have not seen a publicly verifiable source for that assertion, and anyway no one has made clear what "relatively few" means. In the context of 115,000 provisional ballots in Maricopa county alone, one could have, say, 15,000 or 25,000 voters cast conditional provisional ballots and still call that relatively few, but that is still a lot of votes in the context of a race that is currently separated by 80,000 votes and may be a great deal closer after the early votes and other provisionals are counted.
It seems to me that at the very least, Carmona, and hopefully Democratic Maricopa Sheriff candidate Paul Penzone as well, ought to retract their concessions in light of the large number of uncounted votes that the state has now disclosed, and publicly urge any supporters who were told to come to the recorder's office with ID to actually do so. If anyone has any contacts in either campaign to whom they might be able to reach out about this, please let me know. I have spoken to one of the people who answers the phones at the Carmona campaign, but while she was very nice and confirmed that many of the provisional ballots were from (heavily Latino) west Phoenix, and said that she would pass along my concerns, I did not get the feeling that she was in a position to affect the campaign's actions by herself.
I should note that I have been told that there are people at the DSCC keeping an eye on this. But given the amount of so-far missing information about the provisional ballots, and the constantly changing facts regarding how many ballots are actually out there (the number of uncounted ballots are supposed to go down in the days following an election, not up), I would feel a lot more comfortable if Carmona's concession were retracted and voters mobilized to validate any conditional provisional ballot.
Finally, I apologize if anyone feels that expanding my previous comment into a diary, after it had already been incorporated into ThatPoshGirl's diary, violates DKos etiquette in any way. But given the new information about the increased number of outstanding ballots, and given that ThatPoshGirl's prior diary has fallen off the Rec list, I thought this was worth another diary.