A weekend of counting early ballots in Maricopa County hasn't done much to improve the outlook for recreational marijuana legalization in Arizona.
As of Sunday evening, the Maricopa County Recorder's Office said 112,000 early and 55,000 provisional ballots remained to be processed.
Due to the holiday weekend, the updated vote information from Maricopa County is not reflected in the official vote tally on the Arizona Secretary of State's website.
Adding in the correct numbers for Maricopa County would mean roughly 1,197,000 NO votes and 1,115,000 YES votes have been cast, a difference of an estimated 82,000 votes.
That means for Prop 205 to pass across the state, it would require roughly 125,000 of the remaining 167,000 early and provisional ballots in Maricopa County to vote YES, a rate of nearly 75 percent.
Such an event assumes every provisional ballot passes the verification process and is counted. Every uncounted provisional ballot increases the percentage of the remaining ballots the YES campaign needs for the measure to pass.
Another high profile vote that could be impacted by the remaining votes is the race for Maricopa County Recorder. Incumbent Helen Purcell trails by just over 13,000 votes by the latest count against challenger Adrian Fontes.
Proposition 205’s race was called on election night by the Associated Press, but supporters of the measure said they wanted to wait to see the final vote because the margin was so close.
County workers will return Monday morning to continue to count ballots, and will do so every day until all ballots are counted.
Stay with ABC15 and ABC15.com for the latest on the election results.
CLARIFICATION: Ballot counts posted online earlier and used on-air Sunday only took into account Maricopa County and not the entire state. This story now reflects a Sunday evening update on the ballots being counted in Maricopa County and how those results are not shown on the state site.
