[stylin19a]

The biggest problem arose when county elections officials learned that an Arizona company that printed the six-page ballot misprinted it. Because of that mistake, the tabulation machines could not read more than 23,000 ballots. All of those ballots had to be hand-copied and re-run through the tabulation machines

nothing could've gone wrong there...

[Goldwater Girl]

Exactly! Which is why the process is closely observed by representatives of both parties. They do the same thing with ballots that are damaged, filled out with crayon, or have marks and drawings on them in addition to the votes. Most Counties try very hard to ascertain what the intent of the voter was (example: ballot rejected as an “overvote” but visual examination shows the voter marked space for XX and also wrote XX in the space for write in candidates. Clearly they meant their vote to count for XX- so it would count.)
As of right now- nearly 5pm on Friday November 9- the initial counting is not completed.
1- Provisional ballots had 3 days to show proof they were eligible to vote- that is today. So not all of them have been added in for every county.
2- Military absentee votes have to be accepted in the mail through the weekend (I believe) as long as the vote was actually dated prior to election day. So they wont be counted for several days.
Once all the votes have been counted, each County reports their results to the Secretary of State. Margins of less than .5% trigger an automatic machine recount. If margin remain that close, a manual recount of the over and under votes is done by the canvassing board.
Once the results have been certified, there is a process for a candidate to contest the outcome- which is why the judge told Cong West his request is premature.
He needs a good election lawyer- he could have a cause of action, but right now it's hard to tell.
//GG