OK, here’s the deal. We live in AZ at this time of year. As far as I know, there are roughly 400,000 ballots left to be counted from all over the state. These are early (absentee) ballots that were not mailed in but were dropped off on election day at a polling place. They can’t be counted fast by machines the way regular ballots cast at the polls are counted.
It’s important to understand that about 65% of AZ’s population lives in the Phoenix metro area, which is entirely inside Maricopa County. A big chunk of the remaining population lives in the Tucson area, inside Pima County. So those two counties have the vast majority of votes. Maricopa County generally votes slightly on the Republican side overall. Pima County holds the University of Arizona and is more liberal and votes center-left. But the rest of the state, except for the Flagstaff area and the Indian reservations (not many votes there) is very conservative. In fact, almost half of President Trump’s margin of victory was from Mohave County alone, up in Northwest AZ.
As far as where the remaining votes are from, there’s no way to know, except that obviously they’re mainly from Maricopa and Pima counties. There are military votes also yet to be counted from overseas. Yes, it’s also true that hundreds of thousands of votes haven’t been counted in all the other state-wide races for governor and SOS, etc. The calls made in favor of Gov. Ducey to be re-elected, and for other people to win House seats, are all based on historical patterns in the early ballots that are dropped off on election day. It’s theoretically possible that Ducey could still lose after all the early ballots are counted, but the probability of that happening based on history is effectively zero, so they declared him the winner on election night.
It’s only the close races where the counting of these early ballots can change the winner. So that’s basically the deal with the vote counting. The SOS doesn’t disclose the location of the early votes that have been counted and not counted. The percentages counted that you see on the internet are usually the percentage of precincts that have reported on election night. Usually it’s not the percentage of all ballots that have been counted. I’ve only see one website that estimates the total percentage counted.
So McSally still has a reasonable chance to win. AZ isn’t riddled with blatant fraud like Florida, but still the GOP vote watchers have to keep their eyes open for anything and everything in the next two weeks until this election is over.
I think McSally pulls it out.