Vote counting at the Maricopa County (Phoenix) elections center Matt York / AP
The door of the Maricopa County elections office in Phoenix has been opening every two minutes since last Tuesday to the hundreds of volunteers who patiently count the votes for which the future of the world is pending.
They do it under the gazes of the electoral observers of the parties, in front of the cameras, with a
webcam
on all day for the whole world to see, and since Wednesday night, with Trumpist radicals in the parking lot claiming that everything it is a fraud.
"2020, the year that does not stop giving surprises!", Said a lady as she passed by the demonstration on Thursday, on her way to counting votes.
The world wonders how it can take so long for the United States to count the votes.
The first part of the answer is a truism: America is very big and there are many votes.
The second has more to do with a bureaucratic, hyper-guaranteed counting system concentrated in a few hands.
In addition, the terror of any electoral official is to relive the disaster in Florida in 2000, and the protocols take the time necessary to ensure that each vote meets all the guarantees.
EL PAÍS was able to see live on Thursday what that system is like, which has also been overwhelmed by the pandemic and a record number of votes by mail, the most tedious to count.
All the votes in Maricopa County, where 2.6 million people vote, 60% of the voters in the State of Arizona, are received at the elections office in downtown Phoenix.
In the absence of all the ballots by mail (this Friday is the limit), the county elections authority estimates that about two million will have voted.
In 2016, which also had high participation, they were 1.4 million.
The
Arizona Republic
estimated Wednesday morning that 600,000 votes across Arizona have been by mail or early ballot deposited in a mailbox, which follows the same process for counting purposes.
Of those, 450,000 in the largest county, which is the one that decides who wins in this state.
All those votes arrive at a large warehouse in this ministerial-looking building in downtown Phoenix, which is equipped with the latest fire-fighting technology, Erika Flores, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Canvassing Center, explained to EL PAÍS on Thursday.
From there they leave in batches to a room where they are processed by 300 volunteers who take turns between 7.30 in the morning and 10.30 p.m. each day.
The first step is to scan the envelope code, which is unique for each voter and ballot, Flores explains.
The envelope is signed and that signature must be compared with the signature that is registered for that voter.
If there is any doubt, the vote goes to another level: there are those responsible for checking signatures who are in charge of certifying it, either with other official documents of that person or with forensic criteria.
In addition, a random audit of the signatures is done to discover more errors.
If the signature cannot be determined to be authentic, the voter must be contacted and there is a deadline for them to fix it.
The votes that have passed this process go to another team, which physically separates the ballot from the envelope.
This is done with observers from the two games in front.
The ballot, already anonymous, goes to the room where it will be counted.
The first scrutiny is done by a machine that looks like a photocopier, which reads all the options marked by the voter by hand, with a ballpoint pen or marker, in small circles.
The ballots in the United States are not of both parties.
They are very long sheets in which everything is chosen in each call.
In these elections, the Maricopa County ballot includes: the president, a federal senator, three congressmen, a state senator, 15 state representatives, a county commissioner, a county supervisor, the county property recorder, the prosecutor , the chief of archives, the superintendent of colleges, the sheriff, the county treasurer, two members of the school boards of two colleges, the mayor of Phoenix, the mayor of Scottsdale, a Scottsdale councilor, the judges of the Arizona Supreme Court, those of the Court of Appeals and four popular initiatives that are submitted to a referendum.
Any error or oddity detected by the machine in one of these options (for example, marking with an X instead of a circle), causes the ballot to go through a manual review process.
That is what teams from both parties do, who agree on whether it is a valid ballot, decide what was "the intention of the voter" and agree to the vote.
The room in which all this process is carried out, vote by vote, is crossed by several cables that hang from the ceiling.
That's because none of the computers are connected to the Internet.
The whole process is connected to a server that is in the next room, disconnected from the network.
The reason the votes are updated on the county website in leaps and bounds is because, from time to time, the latest results are taken on a
pen drive
and physically taken to a computer connected to the Internet.
This process allowed about 76,000 votes to be counted on Wednesday, between 6,000 and 8,000 every hour, Flores explained.
"This is not weird, it's fast," said one of the employees.
It is not uncommon for the United States to take several days to determine the outcome of a close election.
In California, for example, 4.5 million votes remain to be counted, more than the entire population of Nevada.
No one is stressed nationally by California scrutiny because Biden's victory is clear, but there are local competitions that will take days or weeks to resolve.
That is the process that the president calls corrupt and fraudulent.
Hundreds of volunteers and officials, who have done this for many years, working from morning to night to finish as soon as possible and go home.
By Thursday night, the president's words had further inflamed the fraud allegations.
The Trumpists in the parking lot of this building in Phoenix were celebrating the arrival in Phoenix of Alex Jones, radio preacher and leader of the paranoid far right since before Donald Trump appeared.
In the afternoon, a woman dressed in Trumpian symbols approached the door of the electoral office.
He said he had a complaint about his vote.
"My vote has been lost," he protested without any evidence.
An official attended to her, patiently wrote her complaint and took her data.
Afterward, he went back to work and she to the demonstration.
“Count all the votes!” They cried.
That's what they're doing.
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