What you need to know about the Arizona swing district that could decide who wins the White House

WASHINGTON (AP) —

Maricopa County, Arizona, has become the nation’s top swing district, a place that could determine whether Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump becomes the next president and which party controls the U.S. Senate.

The district is so deeply divided politically that it could take more than a week to find out who won it. This year, election officials warn it could take up to 13 days to count all the ballots in Maricopa.

The protracted vote count has turned Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and dozens of other communities, into the center of election conspiracy theories.

But the reason it takes so long is simple. Here are some things you need to know about this important battlefield:

This is a large, rapidly growing county.

Maricopa County covers more than 9,000 square miles and spans more than four U.S. states. The district, with a population of 4.5 million, is home to 60% of Arizona voters. It has more residents than almost half the states in the country.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1969, the county still had a population of less than 1 million. It has become a magnet for conservatives such as John Kavanaugh, a retired New York Port Authority police officer who moved with his family to Maricopa County in 1993.

Kavanagh was like many other people who moved to Arizona in the 1990s—middle-class people fleeing colder climates and what they saw as economic and political dysfunction around them—for a sunny, affordable and, they believed, cleaner city.

In 1993, the county’s population was 2.3 million, and Republicans dominated the state Legislature and Maricopa County politics.

Today the district is nearly twice the size and its policies have changed. Arizona now has a Democratic governor elected in 2022. Both US senators were elected Democrats.

How Maricopa went from GOP stronghold to swing county

Among the reasons for the change in Maricopa County’s political views was increased migration to Arizona from Mexico.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration fortified California’s border, encouraging illegal migration into Arizona, which already had a significant Latino population. Immigration quickly became a political flashpoint, leaving many in the state’s already large Latino population feeling demonized by Republicans.

The biggest shift came in 2010, when the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature passed SB1070, which allowed local police to stop people they suspected of being in the country illegally. The law, dubbed “Show Me Your Papers” by opponents, was the harshest anti-immigrant law in the country and prompted the state’s Latinos to organize against Republicans.

“This has energized the Latino community like nothing has ever happened before,” said Joe Garcia, leader of the Latino activist group Chicanos Por La Causa.

However, the first rumors that Maricopa County might rise up against the long-dominant Republican Party did not emerge until 2016.

Republican voters such as Gordon Caig became increasingly uneasy about some GOP positions.

Keig couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump or his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton. And once Trump took office and began what Keig saw as his shambolic, adversarial approach to governing, including taking on the popular senior Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain, whose grandchildren Keig’s own daughters knew, Keig couldn’t take it anymore. . He changed his registration to the Democratic Party, saying he believed Republican values ​​”don’t exist for me anymore.”

In 2020, Keig voted for Democrat Joe Biden. The change in the votes of voters like him can be seen by comparing Maricopa’s votes in the 2012 presidential election to the 2020 votes. switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Local operatives dubbed this place the “inverted zone.”

The reverse zone largely reflects where Maricopa’s more educated residents cluster. The county was once less educated than the national average, but the county now has a slightly higher share of adults with a four-year college degree than the national average, a key indicator of voting for Democrats in the Trump era.

The District has become a hotbed of Trump’s election lies and conspiracies.

Trump falsely claimed he won Arizona after losing to Biden in 2020, and he and his allies attacked anyone who said otherwise.

Supporters, some armed and many waving Trump and American flags, gathered outside the county elections office for a rally with the slogan “Stop the Steal.” Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani held the hearing at a Phoenix hotel.

The Republican-controlled state Senate has begun a flawed review of Maricopa’s performance in the 2020 election. The county became something of a tourist attraction for election deniers who traveled from out of state to see the show.

County Recorder Steven Richer, a Republican who has defended the accuracy of the county’s election results, has been criticized by Trump himself, and Richer and his family have faced threats.

Richer says the reason some Republicans remain skeptical about how elections are being run in the county isn’t because there’s anything particularly complicated or unusual about the way votes are counted. That’s because Maricopa, where Biden defeated Trump by about 11,000 votes, may be the best place to undermine confidence in the national election.

He noted that Maricopa is a swing county in a swing state.

“So if you want to really focus your attention on a place that will pay dividends for your theories, Maricopa County would be the place,” Richer said.

Why does a full count take time?

Conspiracy theorists have seized on the way Maricopa reports vote counts in one big burst after Election Day and then bit by bit over more than a week when it finally becomes clear who won. There are three main reasons for this – Maricopa’s size, the proximity of race in the county, and Arizona’s voting laws, which were written and approved by Republicans.

Maricopa is the second largest election jurisdiction in the country. Only reliably Democratic Los Angeles County is larger.

Maricopa reports its results much faster than Los Angeles, but it takes longer to figure out who won because the district — and Arizona as a whole — is evenly divided. This creates a false impression of chaos in the vote counting.

Arizona’s vote-by-mail law is also delaying vote counting. This allows voters to return mail ballots before polls close on Election Day. In 2022, 293,000 voters — one-fifth of the total vote in Maricopa — cast their mail-in ballots on Election Day.

Mail ballots take longer to count because before they can be counted, envelopes must be scanned, ballots sorted and voter signatures verified to ensure they are legitimate. Some states, such as Florida, require all mail-in ballots to be returned by Election Day, so the process ends after the polls close. Because of Arizona law, when polls close in Maricopa, it’s just getting started.

Extending the count even further is a provision in Arizona law that allows voters to “cure” their ballots up to five days after Election Day. This means that if the election commission deems a ballot signature or some other technical detail to be incorrect, the voter has five more days to come back and correct it in order for the ballot to be counted.