US Senate: Sen. Mark Kelly, D, 51.7%; Blake Masters, R, 46.1%. Governor: Katie Hobbs, D, 51.7%; Lake Kari, R, 49.3%. Secretary of State: Adrian Fontes, D, 52.7%; Mark Finchem, R, 47.3%. Attorney General: Kris Mayes, D, 50.4%; Abe Hamadeh, R, 49.6%. All of these races remain too close to call due to the number of ballots that have yet to be counted.
The remaining ballots could skew more Republicans
Meanwhile, the question of who will be the next governor will likely come down to what voters waited until the last minute to cast their early ballots.
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The answer could swing the election to Republican Kari Lake. As of Thursday afternoon, Democrat Katie Hobbs had a 26,879-vote lead over Lake from more than 2 million ballots counted so far. However, there are still about 500,000 ballots that have not been counted. And the largest batch of those — nearly 290,000 in Maricopa County alone — were those Election Day dropouts that are among the last to be counted. That’s important because some Republican candidates urged their supporters to turn in their ballots on Election Day this year. The strategy was based on unsubstantiated claims, going back to the 2020 election, that election officials were watching early votes as they came in to see how many fake ballots they would need to feed into the system to rig the election. The idea was to give them less time to do this. If the GOP faithful had their way, a large portion of those expulsions would skew toward Lake — and possibly other Republican candidates whose vote tallies trailed those of Democrats. “I think we all know how the majority of these people would vote,” Lake said Thursday of those last-minute voters on a talk show hosted by conservative Charlie Kirk.
Where the top races are
The way results are published has not changed in years. The early numbers — those released an hour after the polls closed — are ballots from people who mailed them in early enough to be processed and counted before Election Day. The record has shown that these early returns skew Democratic, even before the latest exhortations from some in the GOP that party loyalists are waiting until the last minute. That allowed early results on Tuesday night to show Hobbs with 56.7% of the vote, which dropped to 50.7% by Thursday afternoon. So did the strong election night lead for Chris Mayes, the Democratic nominee for attorney general. But on Thursday, her lead over Republican Abe Hamadeh was just 16,414 votes. That goes for state schools Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, too. While the Democratic incumbent took the lead at the last count, she trails Republican Tom Horn by less than 4,000 votes. All three Democrats could find themselves bogged down if what’s left to count — mostly those early ballots cast on Election Day — break for their Republican foes by even 1 percentage point. Other Republicans at the top of the ticket, however, would need a really strong GOP advantage in the remaining votes to emerge successful. Existing U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Tucson, led Republican Blake Masters by nearly 115,000 votes Thursday night, with Democrat Adrian Fontes leading Republican Mark Finchem by more than 109,000 votes in the secretary of state race. These numbers also show that some people who voted for Lake and Hamadeh could not support Masters and Finchem. At least 60% of the ballots remaining to be counted, including those rejected on Election Day, would need to include votes for Masters and Finchem to win.
Lake continues to criticize election officials
Lake, in her appearance on the talk show Thursday, did not accuse anyone of inappropriate behavior and trying to rig the final tally. He said, however, there are reasons to raise questions about the election. “They don’t work properly,” Lake said. “It hurts our state, it hurts our people, it hurts the faith we have in our system. And we will reform it.” In fact, she promised that if she wins, on her first day in office she will call a special legislative session to make changes to the electoral laws. If anything, Lake argued that the order in which the results were released was a conscious decision by election officials to “throw cold water on this movement” and promote the idea through cooperative media that the “red wave” some Republicans including Donald Trump’s prediction had failed. Lake singled out Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer for particular criticism, though both are fellow Republicans. “They are controlling the election night narrative in this great country and withholding and delaying the results,” he said. “I think he’s despicable.” At a news conference Thursday, Gates criticized Lake’s claim that the county is deliberately working to release the numbers slowly. “Carrie Lake says that because, frankly, she hasn’t followed the election as much as I have in the last 20 years,” he said, noting that before he was an elected official, he was an Arizona attorney. Republican Party, watching for days what was happening in close races. “Honestly, it’s insulting for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are taking it slow when they work 14 to 18 hour days,” Gates said. But Lake said she wants something like a task force “to investigate what went wrong” and then she wants systematic changes. “I want a one-day vote, frankly, to get as close to that as possible,” he said. “We’ve been voting here for a whole month and it’s outrageous. We have postal ballots floating around.” Such a move could prove difficult to pass, even assuming Republicans remain in control of the legislature. This is because the no-excuse early voting system, in place since the 1992 election, is extremely popular, reaching close to 90% of the vote in 2022. Lake’s criticism also includes the fact that some printers at 60 of Maricopa County’s 223 polling places were not printing some ballots dark enough for scanners to accurately line them up to count votes. This resulted in around 17,000 voters having to drop their ballots into the scanner’s ‘port 3’ to be counted later or go to an alternative polling station. There are concerns that some people, frustrated by the inability to scan their own ballots, never voted. County officials eventually returned the settings to the printers. But the problem was not discovered until election day. “We want to get to the bottom of how this happened so it never happens again,” Lake said. See how ballots are sorted, secured, processed and counted in Pima County after you vote. Courtesy of Pima County Howard Fisher is a veteran reporter who has been reporting since 1970 and covering state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Follow him on Twitter at @azcapmedia or email him at [email protected]
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