The races remained too early to be called two days after the election, with about 600,000 ballots counted, about a quarter of the total. Extended vote counting has long been a staple of Arizona elections, where the vast majority of ballots are cast by mail and many people wait until the last minute to return them. But as Arizona has turned from a GOP stronghold into a competitive battleground, the delays have increasingly become a source of national concern for partisans on both sides. After opening a large lead early on election night when only early returned mail-in ballots were reported, Democrats saw their lead shrink as more Republican ballots were counted. On Thursday morning, Democrats led in the Senate, governor and secretary of state races, while the attorney general’s race was essentially tied. It may take several days to see who won some of the closest contests. With Republicans still in the hunt, it remained unclear whether the stronger-than-expected showing by Democrats across much of the US would extend to Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold that has become a battleground during Donald Trump’s presidency. The GOP named a slate of candidates who won Trump’s endorsement after falsely claiming his loss to President Joe Biden was tainted. Among them is former television news anchor Carrie Lake, who was about half a point behind Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race, a contest that has focused heavily on Lake’s unsubstantiated allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. The Republican nominee for attorney general was also marginally behind. Democrats had more comfortable 5-point margins in the US Senate and Secretary of State races, but with so many ballots pending, the races were too early to call. In the attorney general race, Republican Abraham Hamadeh took the lead from Democrat Kris Mayes. Officials in Maricopa County, the most populous state, said about 17,000 ballots were affected by a printing mishap that prevented vote counters from reading some ballots, a problem that slowed voting in some locations and angered Republicans who were counting on a strong turnout on Election Day. elections. County officials said all ballots will be counted, but did not provide a timeline for that. The cause remains a mystery. The top two officials on the county board of supervisors, both Republicans, said in a statement Wednesday night that they used the same printers, settings and paper thickness during the August primary and election tests, when there were no widespread problems. “There are no perfect elections. Yesterday was not a perfect election,” Bill Gates, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, told reporters earlier in the day. “We’re going to learn from it and get better.” Lake reiterated her commitment to immediately call lawmakers into special session after being sworn in to make sweeping changes to Arizona’s election laws. He wants to significantly reduce early voting and mail-in voting, options chosen by at least 8 in 10 Arizona voters, and count all ballots by hand, which election administrators say would be extremely time-consuming. Ballots can have dozens of races on them. Maricopa County has more than 50 judges on the ballot, over state and local races and 10 ballot measures. “We’re going to go back to small venues where it’s easier to detect problems and fix them and it’s easier to count the votes as well,” Lake told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night. “These are some of the things I would like to see happen. I will work with the legislature.” An urban-rural political divide was evident among Arizona voters. Democrats Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly each garnered support from nearly two-thirds of urban voters, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of more than 3,200 Arizona voters. Suburban voters were about evenly split between the two Democratic candidates and their GOP rivals, Kari Lake and Blake Masters. Small-town and rural voters were more likely to favor Lake and Masters. In the Senate race, suburban men and women were split on candidate preferences. Suburban men clearly favored the Masters, suburban women Kelly. In the gubernatorial race, suburban men overwhelmingly supported Lake, while suburban women slightly favored Hobbs. Meanwhile, Republicans who control the three-member board of supervisors in southeastern Arizona’s Cochise County voted Wednesday to appeal a judge’s ruling that prevented them from hand-counting all ballots, which are also recorded by machines. Efforts to count ballots by hand in the county and elsewhere across the nation are being driven by unfounded concerns from some Republicans that problems with vote-counting machines or voter fraud led to Trump’s 2020 defeat. A judge said the plan ran afoul of state election law that limits hand counting to a small sample of ballots, a process meant to confirm that the machine count was accurate.
Associated Press writers Bob Christie and Terry Tang contributed.
