Don't expect an answer on some of the tight local and state races for a few days still. Statewide, about 374,000 votes remain to be counted - mostly from Pima and Maricopa counties.
Pima County election officials have upped their estimate of ballots to be counted to more than 47,000. Maricopa County has at least 264,000 uncounted ballots.
Predicting exactly how those remaining ballots might affect the final results is impossible because there is no way, at this point, to determine what precincts and districts the votes are from.
But some of the undecided races that could be affected include both Southern Arizona congressional districts, as well as Legislative District 26. At the state level, at least three initiatives remain too close to call, including the medical-marijuana proposition. Some of those races are separated by just a fraction of a percentage point.
The Pima County total includes 25,300 early ballots turned in at polling places Tuesday. Those must be verified by the Pima County recorder, which could take several days, said Elections Director Brad Nelson.
There were 3,200 late-arriving mail ballots that the office received on Election Day, as well as some 13,000 provisional ballots. Typically, those provisional ballots have a rejection rate of about 25 percent. Provisional ballots are those for which voter registration needs to be verified before the votes can be counted.
There were also about 5,800 ballots that have to be duplicated because the scanning machines had trouble reading them, which happens when people use red ink, for example, when filling out their ballots.
Nelson said he's not expecting a final answer on some races for several days, and possibly into the weekend.
Although Democratic Congressman Raúl Grijalva has already declared victory in Congressional District 7, his Republican opponent has refused to concede. "Every voter has a right to have their voice heard, and in a race this close, I feel it would be unfair to my supporters and all the people who have worked so hard on this campaign if I did anything less than fight to the finish," Ruth McClung said.
In Yuma County, where McClung was more popular than Grijalva, there were 5,400 early ballots left to be counted Wednesday, along with 1,820 provisional ballots.
Meanwhile, in Congressional District 8, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' campaign said it remains confident, with her lead of less than 2,400 votes.
Although her Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, was the leader at the polls on Election Day, Giffords was the decisive leader among early voters, with a 10,000 spread between the two. "We are optimistic that this trend will continue as the remaining early ballots are counted," said her campaign manager, Rodd McLeod.
Cochise County was working to process 1,000 provisional ballots and 1,200 early ballots. In results so far, that county has favored Kelly over Giffords.
While there is no way to determine exactly how many of Pima County's 47,000 uncounted ballots fall into each of the two congressional districts, they clearly make up the majority of remaining votes in both races. And in both cases, the incumbents were carrying Pima County by hefty margins, while the challengers were more successful in the more outlying portions of the districts.
Andrew Myers, a spokesman for the Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project, said he was surprised that the results on the medical-marijuana question were so close, given pre-election polling showing it was ahead with voters.
"I think the simple answer is turnout," Myers said. "It's a weird election. The electorate that showed up was much more conservative than what was anticipated."
Even so, Myers said supporters of 203 continue to consider the race a "legitimate tossup" given the thousands of uncounted ballots. "It really is a coin flip right now."
With so many tight races, Matthew Benson, spokesman for the Secretary of State's Office, noted the question of a recount is likely to come up. For all of the races that remain in question, he said, it takes a differential of 200 votes or less to trigger a recount.
Although election officials say they hope to finish counting by this weekend, Benson said the law gives them until Nov. 12.
Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield at rbodfield@azstarnet.com or 573-4243. Reporters Andrea Kelly and Stephanie Innes contributed to this report.
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