Arizona's vote-tabulating problems of the past three days reportedly will spill into next week.
On Thursday, various publications reported that Maricopa County, Arizona's most populous county, would need additional time to process the rest of the legal votes cast — with an estimated 619,000 ballots remaining to be counted.
The reported extra waiting time results will be until "early next week."
Earlier in the day, Bill Gates, a top Maricopa County elections official, said that roughly 290,000 ballots were dropped off on Election Day, and that counting process wouldn't start until Friday, at the earliest.
"If you drop off an early ballot, it means it has to come in on Wednesday and start the process of being signature verified," Gates told CNN. "We have experts here who go through, compare the signature on the outside of the ballot envelope with the signature that we have in our voter registration file, so that takes a while, cause we gotta get that right."
According to The Hill, more than 170,000 ballots were dropped off in Arizona on the 2020 Election Day.
The U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races in Arizona have garnered plenty of national attention since Tuesday.
The Newsmax election tracker has incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., leading his Republican challenger Blake Masters by five percentage points, with 79% of precincts reporting.
However, a number of polling experts believe a significant portion of the remaining uncounted ballots were filed by Republican-leaning voters.
If that's the case, then Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake might be in a great position to secure the governor's office, with reports of Lake trailing Democrat candidate Katie Hobbs — who is currently Arizona's secretary of state — by less than one percentage point.
Lake has been openly critical of Arizona's election officials this week, when talking to the media.
In a Thursday appearance on Newsmax, Lake accused Arizona officials of "slow rolling the results" to "delay the inevitable" of her defeating Hobbs.
"There are 621,000, almost 622,000 votes left to be counted," said Lake, while being interviewed by on-site Newsmax reporter Bianca de la Garza. "A good chunk of those, more than half, 384,000, are mail-in ballots that people carried to the polling place on Election Day to hand deliver."
Lake then added: "Those are people who don't trust the drop boxes and don't necessarily trust the Postal Service, and those will fall our way heavily. We estimate at the low end, those will fall 60% our way. At the high end, perhaps even over 80%."
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