UPDATE: The recount process, at least for early voting ballots, includes more examination by human eyes than it seemed to me at first, though it remains true that many, if not most, of the ballots not showing a vote for the AZ-02 race will be recounted by the same scanning equipment used on election night but reconfigured to count only the Barber-McSally race. Unless there are recount procedures not mentioned in the Election Procedures Manual, we will not know if machine-recounted undervotes contained valid votes.
The Election Procedures Manual does include instructions for duplicating early voting ballots that were returned by the machine as unreadable. The procedures for duplicating ballots apply only to early voting ballots because, as the manual states, a voter voting at a polling place on election day "has the option of correcting his or her ballot at the polling place, and those ballots will have been read by the precinct-based tabulation unit" (p. 177). There appears to be no manual examination of early voting ballots that did not register a vote for a given race, but were not returned by the machine as unreadable (for example, the machine will return as unreadable ballots marked entirely by circling candidates names rather than filling in the ovals, or ballots that include marks on the timing marks). More as I learn it. - MM
The recount of the House race in AZ-02 will begin this week. Democrat Ron Barber trails Republican Martha McSally by 161 votes. Arizona election hands don't expect the numbers to move that much, because previous recounts in Arizona haven't changed results even in races were as close as this year's race in AZ-02.
It might be different if Arizona election law allowed for truly useful recounts.
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