With hundreds of thousands of votes left to tally in Arizona, the Republican nominees for statewide office there are citing the ongoing ballot-counting process as evidence of a corrupt scheme to undermine their campaigns.
Kari Lake, Arizona Republican candidate for governor, speaks to the media after voting on Election Day.
On Thursday, Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, accused election officers of “slow-rolling” the ballot counting manner to “extrade the narrative” and of “dragging their feet” a good way to undermine her marketing campaign and capability governorship.
“They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won,” Lake told Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA. Democratic gubernatorial candidate “Katie Hobbs is not winning, she has never been winning; they’re just not counting votes,” Lake later added.
Priming one’s supporters to suspect the legitimacy of election results is a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook and one that Lake has read from before: Ahead of Arizona’s Republican primary, Lake said, “We’re already detecting some stealing going on” and added that her loss would be evidence of cheating. After she won, she said, “We out-voted the fraud.”
Arizona announced votes need to be recounted
Arizona GOP officials slammed officials in Maricopa County after they announced 17,000 votes would need to be recounted when tabulators failed on election night.
Officials in Arizona’s most populous county said about 7 percent of the ballots were affected by a printing mishap that prevented vote counters from reading them.