By Christopher Conover and Mariana Dale
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The outcome of Arizona's Proposition 123 school funding plan remained undecided going into a third day of ballot counting Thursday.
With 941,000 votes tallied, the margin between "yes" and "no" was 0.82 percent, or about 7,700 votes. Thousands of ballots were yet to be counted, including an estimated 50,000 in Maricopa County and 5,000 in Pima County.
When will the count be completed?
The answer is simple and complicated at the same time. When counties began counting again Wednesday morning, they dealt with early ballots dropped off at the polls and provisional ballots.
Pima County Election Director Brad Nelson said early ballots should be completed by Thursday afternoon and provisional ballots done by the end of Friday.
“If necessary, we will be working over the weekend to get that count finalized,” Nelson said.
Who came out to vote?
Statewide turnout was predicted at 40 percent but will end up lower. At Through Wednesday's tally, about 28 percent had voted.
Morgan Abraham, who chaired the Vote No on Prop. 123 campaign, theorized the group’s Southern Arizona focus swayed voters, at least in Pima County.
“We never turned down a single event,” Abraham said of the group’s outreach. “We’d go from Democratic events to Tea Party Republican events, fairs. Anywhere where people were gathered and wanted to hear about Prop 123, we were there.”
The campaign supporting Prop 123 raised $5 million compared with the no camp’s $15,000. Abraham, however, said those dollars didn’t stretch far outside Arizona’s capital city.
“Pima County is obviously farther away from Maricopa County where the majority of the money was spent on Prop 123,” Abraham said. “So we didn’t have as much media buys down here.”
How are supporters feeling as the counting continues?
Wednesday morning at Sunnyside’s Sierra School, teacher Mary Martinez said she hardly slept the night before.
When asked how she felt, she replied “anxiously waiting.”
Martinez is with the district teachers union that supported the measure. In part, because Sunnyside promised raises for teachers with money from the measure.
Gov. Doug Ducey, who helped broker the settlement that led to Prop 123, said in a statement Wednesday he was feeling optimistic about the eventual outcome.
We continue to feel positive about where #Prop123 stands. Full statement below: pic.twitter.com/crLbM3KVFe
— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) May 18, 2016
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