Arizona primary election voting underway | FOX 10 Phoenix

[00:00:00]We are just 3 hours away from polls closing in Arizona's 2026 primary election.

[00:00:04]>> Tonight's vote will determine who will make it on the ballot in November. And here in Arizona, there are a number of big races that we're keeping an eye on.

[00:00:11]Volunteers are hard at work right now sorting and counting all of your ballots. Things are just getting going there. This is a live look inside the Maricopa County Election Office headquarters where members of all parties will be overseeing this process tonight.

[00:00:26]>> Yeah, and so far so good. We have not had any major problems. We begin our team coverage tonight with Jacob Lutfi at the polling center in Tempe. I guess this is all aided by generally low turnout in a primary election. And if you throw it in the middle of July, we could be looking at maybe 23, 24, 25% turnout.

[00:00:49]>> Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And I was talking to some voters earlier today. They're telling me that, look, despite knowing that sometimes these midterm elections bring out low numbers, they wanted to show out and support.

[00:00:58]We're right here at the Pilot Adult Recreation Center here in Tempe. We've seen a steady flow of people coming in and out of this building for the last hour or so that we've been here. We've seen a lot of cars coming through this parking lot as you can see probably behind me. There's some elections staff, excuse me, some campaign staff out here that's 75 ft limit from the polling location. But again, we've seen a lot of people going in and out, maybe taking about 5 to 10 minutes total to do this.

[00:01:26]They've talked to them and we've been speaking to them. We're saying, "How has it been, you know, going in there?"

[00:01:29]Whether they're dropping off their ballot, whether they're voting in person today. They're telling me that this has been a pretty seamless process, but there was some connectivity issues this morning. We heard from Supervisor Mark Stewart. He said that election officials were working through some of those issues at a handful of polling sites, but around 1:00 p.m. he said that those issues had been resolved, adding that officials now still working to determine what caused that outage. But again, all vote centers are now operating normally with minimal to little to no wait times at all. Now, as of 3:45 p.m., Maricopa County says that over 55,000 people have checked in at vote centers here in the county. Now, voters at the recreation center tell me that they decided to vote in person today for a number of reasons, including one, they forgot to mail in their ballot. They like the process of going and voting in person more. And others simply telling me that they forgot it was election day, so they wanted to come in.

[00:02:23]>> at the library and they called with the get out the vote effort for Lauren Kuby and it was perfect timing, so I just walked over and it was a quick and easy process.

[00:02:33]>> I just prefer to come in and do mine as personally, whatever, so that I know that I put it in there and there's you know, nobody tampered with it or anything like that. I just always prefer to do it in person.

[00:02:46]>> Now, again, polling locations are open till 7:00 p.m. tonight. Again, you can drop off those early ballots still at one of the drop box locations or at polling sites just like this one right here at the pile recreation center in Tempe. There is a number you can call if you're having any issues at any of the polling locations. You There's a number you can call that is 602-506-1511.

[00:03:10]But of course, we'll be out here monitoring kind of these wait times, talking to voters as well again, why they decided to to show up in this heat today to go ahead and cast their ballot.

[00:03:20]But I'll go ahead and send it back to you.

[00:03:22]>> The turnout historically low in the primary, which I mean, that's expected this time too. And then more than a third of registered voters are independents and independents typically don't show up for the primary, either.

[00:03:34]It'll be interesting.

[00:03:35]>> Jacob, one quick thing.

[00:03:37]You know, we were one of the leaders in the nation for mail-in voting and it was really a Republican push in the legislature to get mail-in voting here.

[00:03:45]But what's so interesting is on election day, only 9 to 10% of all the registered voters actually physically go and cast a vote. Most of it is done by mail and it continues to be.

[00:03:58]>> Yeah. And and that was one thing that I was hearing from, you know, voters they I think it was somewhere where only 9 to 10% are actually going to show up here in person based on uh those that have voted in this election. And again, a lot of people, especially some that I spoke to here today, I was asking them, you know, what what makes you show up on election day versus the month that you had to turn in their ballot. Some of them just like the process of seeing their ballot counted that way. They like the process of maybe coming in, interacting with the polling workers, seeing the volunteer. I mean, this is a huge effort by the county. A lot of volunteers working this. So, they want to come in, maybe thank them, maybe, you know, just be part of the process in person. That was kind of one thing I was hearing from voters too.

[00:04:39]>> civic in action. Yeah.

[00:04:40]Yeah. Thank you, Jacob.

[00:04:42]>> Thank you.