Maricopa County officials say no final election results until at least Monday

There are about 400,000 ballots left to be counted in Maricopa alone, along with a few "onesies, twosies here and there," an elections official said Thursday.

By
Debra Heine
-
Arizona
Kari Lake speaking with supporters at a Birthday campaign rally at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Scottsdale Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

(American Greatness) — There will be no final results in Arizona’s election until at least Monday, possibly longer, Bill Gates, chairman of Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors, told CNN on Thursday. There are about 400,000 ballots left to be counted in Maricopa alone, along with a few “onesies, twosies here and there,” he said.

“I think that we’ll see the lion’s share here wrap up by early next week,” Gates said. When pressed, he wouldn’t promise that Maricopa County would be finished counting by Monday.

“Maybe,” he told the CNN reporter.

Former news anchor Kari Lake is locked in a close contest with Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (49.6 to 50.4 percent) while Republican senatorial nominee Blake Masters is trailing his Democrat opponent Sen. Mark Kelly by five points (46.3 to 51.5). The race for the state’s attorney general is also neck and neck between Republican nominee Abe Hamadeh (49.8 percent) and Democrat nominee Kris Mayes (50.2 percent). The remaining votes to be counted, however, are said to strongly favor the Republicans.

There are still 621,000 votes to be counted across the state, reportedly.

Heavily Republican Election Day voters in Maricopa County faced long lines due to printing issues. On Wednesday evening, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors released a joint statement acknowledging that 70 out of 223 voting locations were impacted by the printer issues on Election Day.

They said:

“The printer settings for the Ballot-On-Demand printers at Vote Centers were the same ones we used in the August Primary. The paper was the same thickness. Prior to the General Election, the Elections Department test-printed and test-tabulated hundreds of ballots without issue.
We are committed to finding out what factors changed that led to issues at 70 Vote Centers on Tuesday. We are grateful to county techs who found a fix to the problem by adjusting printer settings.”

The supervisors said around 7 percent of ballots, or around 17,000, were impacted by the printer issues.

Voters were given the option to place their ballots in “Drop Box 3” to be counted later. Those 17,000 ballots — which are expected to lean heavily Republican — are now being counted, according to ABC15 reporter Nicole Grigg.

Pollster Rich Baris disputed the notion that only 17,000 votes were impacted by the tabulation issues, given how widespread the problem was on Election Day.

Meanwhile, civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who is on Lake’s legal team, noted on Twitter that the votes that have been counted thus far have mostly been early votes favoring the Democrats, and “faking out the public.”

“Votes ON Election Day — record turnout in-person & drop-off — weighted to Kari Lake & that is why the large counties are faking out the public by holding those,” she tweeted. “We win those.”

Dhillon said that “partisan hackery” is contributing to the delays in both Maricopa and Pima counties.

Lake was still optimistic when she spoke with Newsmax Thursday afternoon.

“They’re slow-rolling the results and trying to delay the inevitable. We will win this. I am 100 percent sure of that,” she said, adding that Hobbs “has never been in the lead. They just haven’t counted the votes.”

Lake appeared on Fox News’ Hannity Thursday night to explain once more that she is “100 percent confident” that she will win. Lake also said she believes Masters and Hamadeh will win their races, as well.

 

Debra Heine

Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.

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