Arizona wants to be the inverse Iowa. It’s setting itself up to be the Georgia of 2020 or Florida of 2000: the location where the television cameras will be focusing on election monitors checking ballots as the nation waits on the edge of its collective seats to find out the winner of the 2024 election. Or control of the Senate. Or something.
According to the Washington Post, Arizona election officials are cautioning the media and the public that new recount laws could delay the final determination of various elections until weeks after Election Day in 2024. And worse: the new laws, if followed as enacted now, would most certainly mean the final counts of the president election could not be certified before mandated dates.
It’s a lesson in unintended consequences: with bipartisan support for most of the laws, the package of election laws lowered the gap needed to trigger an automatic recount. When the laws were considered in the wake of the 2020 debacle in the state, county election officials noted that the manpower needed to conduct all those recounts–including many that must, by law, be done by hand–would interfere with the announcement of winners in virtually all primary and general elections in statewide races.