Counties in Arizona, Pennsylvania fail to certify election results by legal deadlines
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Some 164,000 people's votes for the midterm elections in Arizona and Pennsylvania may end up not officially counting. That's because local officials missed the legal deadlines for certifying the results in their states. Here's NPR's Hansi Lo Wang.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: It's a kind of vote by an Arizona county board of supervisors after an election that usually doesn't get much attention.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Chair votes aye. All those opposed?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Nay.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Nay.
WANG: But those nay votes by Republican officials meant they refused to certify more than 47,000 Arizonans votes in Cochise County on Monday, despite finding no legitimate problems. That's raised alarms, including with the Democratic chair of the county's board Ann English.
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ANN ENGLISH: I'd like to say that there is no reason for us to delay.
WANG: And for most of the country so far, there's been no delay and no trouble with getting the midterm election results certified. But in Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, the local board of elections deadlocked along party lines on whether to make some 117,000 ballots official. One of the Democrats on the board abstained from voting, though that official told the Associated Press later on that he planned to support certifying at another meeting later this week, and that would be after the state's legal deadline.
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TAMMY PATRICK: These are antics that are not allowed under state law.
WANG: That was Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official who's now a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, speaking to reporters last week. In fact, Arizona's secretary of state is now asking a state court to force the Cochise County officials to certify the election results by Thursday. It's the kind of post-election controversy that, after the chaos in 2020, Patrick had expected.
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PATRICK: The certification would be another mundane, banal administrative procedure that was going to be leveraged and used for partisan potential gain or partisan rhetoric, at least. And that's what we're seeing here.
WANG: And what we may be seeing next is more unusual delays as officials in Arizona get ready for the statewide certification deadline next week.
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.
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