Gee, whatever can Katie Hobbs mean? Actually, Arizona’s Secretary of State gives some rational background on what’s happening with their vote count from last night, and explains why the official numbers aren’t changing yet this morning. Despite rumors of reversed counts and narrowing margins, the official numbers won’t change unless the counties update their counts.

That won’t happen until the end of business today for Maricopa County, Hobbs told KTAR a little while ago, but she expects some significant changes. That is where most of the outstanding ballots are being counted:

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs joined @BroomheadShow and detailed where things stand for Arizona in the ongoing elections process. pic.twitter.com/Nk5O3xDHWk

— KTAR News 92.3 (@KTAR923) November 4, 2020

Hobbs gently demurs from “calling” the race, and explains that’s not her job. She does caution others not to do so either, but to wait for the final counts to be registered with her office. As soon as she gets those, Hobbs says, the official tally will get updated on the state’s website.

The New York Times pointedly notes now that only 86% of the estimated vote has yet been counted, as of noon ET today. That itself if a mild correction to earlier reports that 99% had reported. Katie Pavlich reports that in her Townhall curation of tweeted developments:

This gives some credence to the Trump camp's argument in a call with reporters that it expects to pull ahead in Arizona, because most of the outstanding vote is in Trump-friendly territory.

— Jeff Dufour (@dcdufour) November 4, 2020

So there is a significant amount of the vote still outstanding in Arizona. If it’s all from Maricopa, it won’t help Trump much, as Maricopa tilts Democratic and Biden’s up six points in the county’s count at the moment. Vaughn Hillyard claims there is a wide distribution of uncounted votes that could still push Arizona into Trump’s column, which a firm named Data Orbital says fits their analysis:

And we have an update on estimated # of Arizona early ballots left to be processed from some counties:

Gila: ~2300
Graham: ~1100
Greenlee 652
La Paz: 880
Maricopa: At least 250k
Pima: ~92k
Pinal: ~62k
Santa Cruz: ~3k
Yavapai: ~10k
Yuma: ~19k https://t.co/AVEYRMv0VP

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) November 4, 2020

The analysis on outstanding ballots mostly being from Maricopa and favoring Biden misses a huge factor: at least 250k of the remaining ballots have a Republican advantage of 20%. Unlike in other states, late earlies will favor Trump. #ElectionTwitter #Election2020 #AZ

— Data Orbital (@Data_Orbital) November 4, 2020

If the vast majority of these are from Maricopa and Pima (Tucson) as Hillyard reports, I am not sure how this looks like good news. The operating theory (as I understand it) is that these are mainly same-day voting ballots, which should favor Trump, but it’s still in two Democratic strongholds. Sixty-two thousand in Pinal should be very good news for Trump, but up against ~350K in two Democratic strongholds? Trump would need a miracle to wring victory out of Phoenix and Tucson.

But first, perhaps we should count the votes before writing it off or calling it, as Governor Doug Ducey suggests:

Not so fast. The race has narrowed in #AZ considerably. 130,000 votes separate the candidates, with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted, from all over the state. I'll say it again: Let's count the votes, and let the people decide rather than making declarations. https://t.co/1WYhjChrtm

— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) November 4, 2020

I agree, so stay tuned for a 5 PT update to these numbers.