From Reader N

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PHOENIX — The process to count ballots after an election is a long and tedious one — but in a tight race like the U.S. Senate one in Arizona, there can be added pressure to speed up the process.

But Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes said residents will have to wait at least one more day for an updated ballot count due to the high volume of ballots — approximately 500,000 — that need to be counted.

“Early votes received — that means those green envelopes with the signatures on them that folks dropped off — we’ve got 195,296 of those,” Fontes told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Bruce St. James and Pamela Hughes on Wednesday.

“Those include some of the provisionals and a lot of the out of precincts from the vote centers. All of those have to be signature verified and to do that we’ve got to scan them and sort them first.”

Approximate split of outstanding Maricopa ballots:

300k – mailed in or received by post office on election day

200k – "late earlies" dropped off at the polls + provisionals.

— The AZ Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) November 7, 2018

Fontes said, before voters knew whether Republican Martha McSally or Democrat Kyrsten Sinema will represent them in the U.S. Senate, elections officials need to start opening and separating those early voting ballots in order to tabulate them. That work continued throughout the day on Wednesday.

“We’ve got early votes in house from before Election Day that we did not get to tabulating because we were concentrating on getting ready for Election Day,” Fontes said.

We have “in the number of just over a quarter million — 277,104 — (ballots) to be tabulated. Those are going through the machines right now.”

But that is not all: Officials also need to hand sort many of the ballots.