An elections worker transports a tray of ballots in the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Nov. 5, 2024. (Photo by Dylan Wickman/Cronkite News)
PHOENIX – The Maricopa County Elections Office canvassed election results Thursday, sharing the total number of ballots cast in the 2024 election in Maricopa County and other data. Elections Director Scott Jarrett and Assistant County Manager Zach Schira briefed the media.
“We had a turnout of 80.34%, which is another very high level of turnout compared to prior elections,” Jarrett said. “So if you go back all the way to the 1970s, there’s only been three election years where we’ve had turnout that’s been over 80%. Those three years are 1980 – that was when President Ronald Reagan won – also in 2020 and then now in 2024. We had a very good showing from Maricopa County voters.”
Maricopa County is the third largest voting jurisdiction in the country. The county saw a total of 2,078,460 ballots cast – of 2,587,197 registered voters – for the presidential election, which was the second-most ever for the county.
Early voters accounted for 53%; 11% came from voting early in person; 30% were ballots that were dropped off; and 12% voted on Election Day, with less than 1% on provisional ballots. There were over 210,000 in-person early voters, which was the most ever for Maricopa County, and 631,00 drop-offs.
Republican Donald Trump took back the county this election after he won it in 2016 by 41,425 votes but lost it in 2020 by 45,109. This year, Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 71,515 votes in the county.
There was another tight race in the county between Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, who were fighting for a crucial U.S. Senate seat in the race for majority control of the Senate.
Gallego won Arizona, giving the state two Democratic senators, Gallego and Mark Kelly, who was not up for reelection. Gallego won Maricopa County by 105,301 votes, which translates to 5.18 percentage points.
There were four states this year where Trump won but a senator of the opposing party was elected: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Processing took Arizona counties significantly longer to process due to having a two-page ballot that included 13 ballot measures.
“Your team ran a smooth November general election, and they did so under circumstances not seen since 2006,” Schira said to election officials. “This variable doubled the amount of paper processed this election. This might not sound like a big deal, but when you realize that most elections only take one page for one voter, this year, taking two pages for one voter effectively doubled the turnout that your team processed in the 2024 election.”
Maricopa County hired 4,300 temporary workers this election: 2,700 poll workers, 800 Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center workers, and 800 county employees, who went through a combined 19,800 total training hours, both online and in person. Along with the temporary staff, there were also hundreds of political observers that Jarrett thanked.
“Our political party observers truly are volunteers,” Jarrett said. “They are not paid for their duty, but they do show up. We had observers throughout every process at our central counting facility and visited nearly every one of our voting locations, whether that was during early voting or and on Election Day.”
Maricopa County had 246 vote centers on Election Day, with an average distance of less than 2 miles apart. “On average, across all locations, was about 10 to 11 minutes on our wait times at our vote centers,” Jarrett said.
The statewide canvass will be held Monday morning. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes will present the 2024 certified election results from across the state.
