Charismatic, pugnacious and telegenic, Kari Lake grabbed the spotlight with her belief in Donald Trump’s stolen campaign mantra, her disdain for the media establishment that once paid her golden salary as a news anchor, and her commitment to declare an “invasion” on the southern border if elected governor of Arizona. But when Maricopa County, the state’s largest electoral district, reported its first count of 840,000 votes on election night, it showed Ms. Lake in second place, 16 percentage points behind Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent. In the days that followed, Ms. Lake and her supporters maintained an unwavering faith in her victory. “We know we’re going to win it. They’re trying to delay the inevitable,” he told conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck on Thursday. He might be right. By Thursday afternoon, the difference was just one percentage point. Ms Lake is an avowed election denier who has repeated the lie that Mr Trump won the 2020 vote, and prominent far-right figures have taken her second-place finish in early voting as evidence of fraud. “If Maricopa County was Brazil, the United Nations and State Department would have declared an illegal coup taking place,” tweeted Mike Cernovich, who rose to fame as a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy, a message echoed by Harmeet Dhillon , Ms. Lake’s attorney who is president of the Republican National Bar Association. Highlights of key races in the 2022 US midterm elections But there is good reason to believe that the uncounted votes in Arizona will contain significant support for Ms. Lake, not because of an effort to suppress her victory but because her supporters, beset by suspicions of early voting, turned out in large numbers to vote. on election day. “It really started with Donald Trump,” who fueled doubts about the legality of early voting, said Ellen Purcell, the former county recorder for Maricopa County who spent 28 years managing elections in the Phoenix area. It’s one of the ways that conspiracies about ballot stuffing and other election fraud overturned the US election — and one of the reasons that, two days after the Nov. 8 vote, it remains hard to tell who won. Tallyers across the country have not yet counted enough votes to determine which party will control Congress. Republicans have, so far, won an additional five seats in the US House of Representatives, enough to take a slim numerical majority if that tally holds. Opinion: Another midterm election brings another unreadable America The Senate is less certain. Pre-election polls showed Democrats had the best chance of retaining their majority in that chamber, which has the power to reject presidential nominations for key offices. Republicans currently hold 49 seats in the Senate. Democrats, 48. The final result is based on three Senate races: Georgia, which will go to a runoff in December; Nevada, where tens of thousands of Las Vegas-area ballots remain uncounted. and Arizona, where hundreds of thousands of votes have yet to be counted, most from Phoenix and its suburbs. Although Arizona’s current counts show Democrats ahead, conservative and liberal election observers believe uncounted ballots—particularly those cast on Election Day—contain stronger support for Republican candidates. In the past, Republicans in Arizona have tended to vote early. That changed after Mr. Trump became president, and especially after he blamed his 2020 defeat on vote rigging. “Republicans just threw away voting by mail — which started in 2020,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic data analyst and political strategist in Phoenix. “I’ve never seen anything take hold so dramatically before and cause such a dramatic change.” This year, Maricopa County received 290,000 early ballots on Election Day, a record 70 percent higher than in 2020. Those ballots must be processed, including signature verification, before they can be counted — all of which is time-consuming. Those who support late voting are now “reaping what you have sown” when those polls are last counted, Arizona’s Republican state senator TJ Shope said on Twitter Thursday. However, it is the Republican candidates who have repeatedly – and without evidence – called Maricopa County’s administration of elections “criminal.” On social media, Mr. Trump blamed Arizona for slow reporting because they “want more time to cheat!” To call it willful lethargy is “insulting,” Bill Gates, a Republican who chairs the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, shot back Thursday. “We are not late at all,” he said. Among the issues: Arizona Republicans ordered multimillion-dollar audits for the 2020 election, leading to additional, more time-consuming verification of ballots in 2022. Ms. Lake, however, has vowed that voting will never be the same in Arizona if she wins. “We’re tired of being embarrassed by Maricopa County,” she told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, promising to get rid of the sorting machines and make it easier to count votes. While advocates say such efforts will boost confidence in elections, past experience has shown otherwise. “The more ballots are tampered with, the more concern there is that those ballots are compromised,” said Ms. Purcell, a former Maricopa County recorder. Arizona already requires ballots to be counted at 2 percent of polling places to verify machine results. Ms. Purcell recalled dividing poll workers into teams of three, each casting only 10 ballots at a time. “We found over the years, if it was more than that, they got confused,” he said.
