The photo above was not taken outside the Maricopa County Elections Department at 5:53 p.m. yesterday, when County Recorder Helen Purcell announced that the last votes in the county -- and indeed, the state -- have been tabulated.
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According to the Secretary of State's office, official results are due out on December 3.
Stephen Lemons has pointed out some of his immediate observations from this year's election, and we'll give you some more things to think about.
We ended up being almost correct in our "good," "bad," and "ugly" designations for the nine congressional races, as far as how close the vote tallies would be.
In our "good" races, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won by about 4 percentage points, Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick won by nearly 4 percentage points, Democratic Congressman Ron Barber won by less than 1 percentage point.
We also called the race between Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva and Republican challenger Gabriela Saucedo-Mercer "good," although we commented "Ehhhhhhhh," essentially meaning it looked like Grijalva could have won by fewer than 10 percentage points. He won by about 21.
To our credit, the closest margin of victory in our "bad" and "ugly" races was 28 percentage points.
Our picks for somewhat-close or notable state legislative races were easy, because in many races, there weren't even enough candidates to make a race -- two major-party state Senate candidates, and four state House candidates.
Feel free to make fun of us for our "dark horse" pick, Republican LD-27 House candidate Dan Coleman, who lost to Democratic state Representatives Ruben Gallego and Catherine Miranda by about 25 points and 26 points, respectively.
State Senator Frank Antenori and Representative Ted Vogt, both Republicans, were defeated by Democratic challengers in LD-10.
Republican Darin Mitchell -- the apparent phony who doesn't even live in LD-13 -- was easily elected to the House, since there were no Democrats on the ballot. Kudos to the 3,404 voters in that district were apparently paying attention, since Representative Steve Montenegro scored that many more votes than Mitchell, even though they were running unopposed.
Democratic Representative Ed Ableser took down Republican Senator Jerry Lewis in the LD-26 Senate race.
Perhaps the most interesting result came from LD-28. That district elected a Republican Senator, and one Democrat and one Republican for the House. Due to redistricting, the three major candidates in the House race were all sitting Representatives. Republican Amanda Reeve's the odd one out.
To see if your favorite lunatic will be back at the Legislature -- or to check any other unofficial result from the Secretary of State's office -- click here.
