Comment PHOENIX — Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, has experienced technical malfunctions at dozens of polling places in a key county to call Thursday for a special legislative session to overhaul the state’s election system, which he would have the authority to do if elected. Lake has yet to say the election results are unreliable, as she did in 2020 when President Biden won the state, but her assertion that the system needs immediate change came as officials continued to count votes, a process that they warned it could take up to 12 days. Results released so far show Lake, a former television news anchor, locked in a tight race with her Democratic challenger, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Hobbs, meanwhile, tweeted: “This election will be decided by the voters, not by the volume with which a freelance former TV reporter can shout conspiracy theories.” On Tuesday, nearly a third of polling places across Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and more than 60 percent of the state’s voters — experienced problems with printers that produce on-demand ballots for individual voters. Starting early Tuesday morning, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling stations the sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be read properly by vote-counting machines, causing the ballots to be rejected, according to county officials. Those officials had previously said a smaller number of sites had problems. Officials said they have yet to determine the cause of the printer problems. they said the printers passed required sanity and accuracy tests before Tuesday and had been used during the August primary and the 2020 election with the same settings without problems. Voters had the option of waiting for the problems to be resolved, going to different polling locations or casting their ballots in secure ballot boxes that were transported to downtown Phoenix and counted there. Voters placed about 17,000 ballots in the secure boxes, more than in previous elections, county officials said. They said all votes would be counted, that all voters who wanted to vote were able to do so, and that printer problems would not affect the vote count. Maricopa’s problems remained a mystery Thursday to officials in Washington, who have been frustrated since Election Day by the lack of a clear explanation communicated to both voters and election watchdogs, two people monitoring the process said. developments. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Kari Lake wants to change how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted In a state central to widespread conspiracy theories following President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat, some Republicans used the problems in Maricopa County to call for the elimination of early voting and vote-counting machines. Although early voting has long been popular in Arizona, ballots returned in the days leading up to Election Day and on Election Day always take time to process, and ballots are processed in the order they are received. To get results posted faster, county leaders for weeks urged voters to return their ballots — which had more races than ever before — as soon as possible. Election officials were processing about 400,000 ballots in Maricopa County as of Thursday night. Officials here said they had always expected counting to take up to 12 days, although they expected to report at least 95 percent of the results by Friday. On Thursday, county officials said it would take longer to reach that goal and that they are working through the federal Veterans Day holiday and the weekend. Voters cast about 290,000 ballots on Election Day, the largest number ever released. The high volume of late withdrawals suggests that many voters may have acted on instructions from Republican leaders and candidates urging people to either vote in person or drop off early ballots at polling places. Some Republicans claimed, without evidence, that the release of the results — which happens during every election here — suggested county officials wanted to delay what they claimed would be a victory for Lake, and perhaps other Republican candidates. Officials in Pima County, where Tucson is located, rejected such claims. Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the county recorder, said it took time to process the large volume of early ballots that did not arrive by Election Day. “We follow the law,” he said. Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates (R) noted that it typically takes days to complete the board in the county, a pattern that has recently attracted national attention because of Arizona’s swing-state status and narrow margins in statewide contests . Gates, who twice led the GOP’s state government integrity efforts on Election Day, said Lake may not have been familiar with the county’s classification process. “Honestly, it’s insulting for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are rolling slowly when they work 14 to 18 hours,” he said, holding a lectern at times during a 45-minute press conference. “I really hope this is the end of this now. We can be patient and respect the results.” Gates said it’s important that Arizonans don’t think that “we’re picking and choosing which ballots to count. We use an accounting concept: first in, first out.” Researchers examining social media efforts to delegitimize election results said fraud narratives gained less traction in the immediate aftermath of the vote. But others warned that a prolonged count in Arizona could create an opportunity for misleading narratives to take hold or for rogue actors to try to disrupt the process. Immediately, Republican candidates and their allies in Arizona seized on the engineering issues to prime the public for sweeping legislative changes. Lake ran on a platform during the primary to count millions of votes not by machines, but by hand, a method that election experts say is less accurate. He welcomes “one-day voting,” where ballots are cast in designated districts. Arizona allows people to vote by mail, and in Maricopa County they can vote at any polling location. Lake has been particularly vague in the final days of the campaign about her plans for electoral reform. At a stop in southeast Phoenix on the Sunday before Election Day, he told reporters simply that he planned to “work with our wonderful legislators and we’re going to come up with great laws that will ensure the vote.” Her most hard-line allies also seemed to be dubious. Wendy Rogers, a far-right state senator who pushed for “decertification” of the 2020 election, a process experts say is not possible under state or federal law, refused to commit to a system that would allow voting on just one day — an idea promoted by far-right activists here. When asked at the same event if he was in favor of such a proposal, he replied: “Essentially.” But the troubles in Maricopa County have given Lake and her supporters a new target for their ire. In an appearance on a radio show hosted by Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Phoenix-based Turning Point USA, Lake called for “a task force to investigate what went wrong, how these anomalies occurred.” “This is either mismanagement, incompetence, we don’t know what it is,” he added. Kirk went further, claiming without evidence, “I think it was a traffic jam by design.” How a pro-Trump youth group reshaped the Arizona GOP, testing democracy But that belief was not echoed by Lake, who had a delicate dance to perform — speaking out against the administration in an election that, she told her supporters, would put her in the governor’s office. “It’s a messed up electoral system,” he said. “We knew we had to overcome it to get the win.” This message left the Republican candidates in a difficult position. Other campaigns have taken their cues from Lake on how to respond to uncertainty in the days after the election, according to a Republican familiar with the discussions. Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, suggested Tuesday that something fishy was afoot, but he remained mostly silent on social media as Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) gained a lead over him in partial results . A fundraising appeal by Masters’ campaign on Thursday did not allege impropriety, but argued that “some of the issues that we’ve seen come up during this election are troubling.” He added, “We expect a contentious path forward and legal battles.” Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general, attacked Maricopa County but stopped short of arguing that the vote, which pitted him against Democrat Kris Mayes, was fraudulent. The exception was Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for secretary of state, who was trailing Democrat Adrian Fontes in preliminary results. Finchem speculated on Twitter that Fondes and other Democrats could be “in the back room with ballots.” Fontes replied that he was “having coffee with an old friend”, adding: “Stop with this conspiracy rubbish”. More broadly, the state’s top Democratic candidates urged patience, with Hobbs tweeting, “Accurate election results take time.” Kelly thanked his supporters on social media, writing: “I’m sure we will win. But we don’t have the final results yet.” Lake held back Wednesday from meetings with advisers, outside allies and people who may eventually serve in her administration. Among them was Floyd Brown, a longtime conservative operative and founder of the news and opinion website Western Journal, according to two people familiar with the discussions, one of whom said it was a consultative meeting. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions. Brown, who did not…
