This sucks.
Reed said 827,380 Maricopa County residents had requested absentee ballots or had voted early as of 2 p.m. Friday. The county has seen 566,656, or 68.4 percent, of those ballots returned. There are about 1.7 million registered voters in the county.
Early ballots figure to create a significant delay in the compilation of final results. Officials expect that about 200,000 early ballots won't be marked or mailed early but instead will be walked into a polling place or will arrive via mail on Election Day.
Those ballots won't be processed until two days after the election, Reed said, and Maricopa County hopes to have all of them compiled by Nov. 21.
I'm not sure why ballots walked in on Election Day can't be counted with votes cast that day. But if the race is within 200,000 votes -- and both the presidential and AZ-03 contest between Shadegg and Lord could qualify (AZ-03 is mostly in Maricopa) -- then we might not have final results for quite some time.