2026 Election: Maricopa ballot counting continues

The ballots that are being tallied in Maricopa County, this is going to be quite a big job. Yeah, workers will be doing these late into the night. We'll get several rounds of vote dumps where we'll get a whole bunch all at once. And Brian Webb is at the tabulation center joining us live with more on what's going on out there. Hey, Brian. We just had that big ballot drop at 8 o'clock. More than a million ballots counted now. Those were the early ballots, if I'm not mistaken. But let's find out from the pro. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Debbie Lesko. Debbie, thank you for your time tonight. Thank you for having me. Well, tell me where we're at. So that 8 o'clock dump was early ballots. Is that right? And where do we go from here? Yeah, they were early ballots. And so all the people that mailed in ballots or voted early, that was the first dump, we'll say, of the ballot results. And then we'll get another one around 10 o'clock tonight. And then the election workers will be working throughout the entire night, and we'll get more results as the night goes on and into tomorrow. We just talked about some voters just finally getting inside to cast their vote. It's almost after nine o'clock now. Have you heard of any issues out there? No, everything went very smooth today. I went to three voting centers myself and watched it myself and everything was running smooth. I was very impressed with how all the election workers did. Very great. Arizona Debbie sometimes gets a bad rap for how long it takes us to count all of these ballots. When should we see final results? Any guess there? Our goal is that 95 percent of the results will be done by Friday and then the final results will probably be at the beginning of next week. It's all these people that request early ballots but don't mail them back and they drop them in the drop box today and those have to have signature verifications on the outside of the envelopes and be processed and that's what takes so long. In the past you've been an election skeptic. Has that changed and if so, why? You know, I'm really impressed with Maricopa County elections. You know, I didn't know until I got into this job all the ins and outs of the election work. We hire over 4,000 temporary election workers, and they're so bipartisan teams. You know, a lot of things are bipartisan teams. So if something nefarious went on, both the Republicans and Democrats would have to be in on it. So your message to any skeptics out there tonight? It ran very well, and I am very proud of the job that all the election workers did. I think this was a smooth, fair, honest election, and they should trust that their vote counts. And you're a longtime Republican, not going well for your party tonight. Why is that? It's a tough night for Republicans, I have to say, but you know, here in Maricopa County, we still have a lot of votes that need to be counted. All the people that came to vote today, those won't be counted tonight. You won't get the results tonight. So let's see. Don't, don't be too sad, Republicans, because it's going to get closer. And hopefully, since I'm a Republican, some Republicans are going to take over the Democrats. But It was a tough night for Republicans, I have to say. All right, fair enough. Debbie, thanks for your time. Thank you. All right, that's the latest from the election office in Maricopa County in Phoenix. I'm Brian Webb. Back to you guys.