By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX -- With only about 77,000 votes left to count in Arizona, Joe Biden maintained his lead late Sunday over Donald Trump.
The most recent tally has the former vice president -- and president-elect by most calls -- up by nearly 17,000.
Of the more than 26,800 votes added in the past 24 hours, Trump tallied fewer than 14,000. And while that was better than the nearly 12,300 for Biden, it still amounted to just 52 percent of all the new votes tallied.
What makes that significant is that the president actually has to get about three votes out of every five left to tally to catch up to Biden's lead.
That could prove difficult given how few ballots remain uncounted.
About 38,000 of those uncounted ballots are in Maricopa County. And to date Biden is running nearly 47,000 votes ahead there.
And Pima County, with another 18,700 yet to be counted, also is unlikely to be much help to the president, with Biden running ahead of Trump by a 3-2 margin.
Trump has done better in some rural counties, like Cochise where he has a 3-2 edge. But there are only about 6,400 votes to be counted there.
The president is getting the same margin of victory in Yavapai County. Here, too, however, there are less than 2,300 to be tallied.
And in Pinal County, where Trump gets 4 votes for every three for Biden, there are only about 2,300 outstanding ballots.
The final word on how Arizona voted might not come until Thursday.
That's because state law provides five business days after the election for voters to ``cure'' their ballots.
That specifically includes verifying mismatched signatures.
There also are situations were voters show up at polling places on Election Day but lack the required identification. They get to vote a "provisional'' ballot which is set aside until they come to county offices with the proper documentation.
Normally all that would end late Tuesday. But with Wednesday being a state and federal holiday, the Secretary of State's Office said that moves everything back to Thursday.
So far, only the Associated Press and Fox News have been been willing to formally put Arizona into Biden's column.
But those calls were based on returns as of early Wednesday morning when fewer than three-quarters of the votes had been tallied. Since then the president has slowly eaten away at the challenger's margin.
Neither The New York Times nor CNN were ready to make that leap and call Arizona for Biden as of late Sunday.
Regular counting aside, the results could be affected by a lawsuit filed Saturday by the president's reelection committee and the state and national Republican parties. They are challenging a procedure used at some polling places when ballots were initially rejected by tabulating machines.
The advice of poll workers, the attorneys contend, effectively denied voters the chance to have their ballots reviewed by hand and have their choices registered. And they want a judge to order those ballots to be found and examined by hand to determine if some votes were improperly ignored.
"Potentially thousands of voters across Maricopa County have been disenfranchised by systematic improper tabulator overrides,'' attorneys for the president and the parties charge.
Even if there are that many votes that really weren't properly recorded, however, the question is whether a sufficient majority of these are for Trump, enough to help him make up the deficit.
But GOP attorneys are counting on is that Trump has run about 2-1 to Biden on those day-of-election ballots cast at polling places, precisely the ones they contend may not have been tallied.
No date has been set for a hearing.
Whether Biden takes Arizona's 11 electoral votes -- regardless of what news organizations think -- may end up irrelevant.
There is general consensus that Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes will go to the Democrat. And that gives Biden more than the 270 he needs, with or without Arizona.
That is why the Trump campaign is engaged in multiple lawsuits in the Keystone State.
The most significant deals with a ruling by that state's Supreme Court extending the deadline for receiving ballots until Nov. 6. The U.S. Supreme Court already has rebuffed one challenge.
But a second one is pending. And Justice Samuel Alito, while refusing to enjoin those late-received ballots from being counted, did order them to be segregated should the full court decide to look at their validity.
There may, however, not be enough Biden votes in those ballots, even if disqualified, to make a difference.