On Thursday (November 17), Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, refused to concede victory to Democrat Katie Hobbs, a move that raises concerns about the state’s election process.
On Monday (November 14), three days before Lake announced she would not concede, the Associated Press called the race in favor of Hobbs. Objecting to the results, Lake revealed she would be assembling a legal team to collect “evidence and data” about Arizona’s election process.
In an address posted on Thursday morning, Lake told supporters to “rest assured,” pointing to the “brightest legal team” she had assembled to “correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week.”
Lake continued, explaining she would do everything within her power “to right these wrongs.”
Lake’s opposition to Monday’s decision is unsurprising, given the Trump-backed candidate had avoided answering the question regarding whether she’d accept the results on multiple occasions.
The Arizona Republican had described election officials as “incompetent” and tweeted — hours after the race was called in favor of Hobbs — that “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”
To substantiate her denial of the election results, Lake pointed to the printing malfunctions experienced in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa County.
She called the malfunctions “unforgivable” and claimed voters had been disenfranchised.
The printing malfunction — where printers produced ballots with ink too light for tabulation machines to read — affected 70 of the county’s 223 voting centers.
To solve the issue, Maricopa County election officials gave voters three options: wait in line for the problem to be resolved, go to a voting center that didn’t have the issue or deposit ballots in a separate and secure box that would be taken to a central location for tabulation.
According to county officials who deny Lake’s allegations, no voter was denied the opportunity to cast their ballot, a statement backed by a state judge’s ruling denying an emergency lawsuit by Lake and Republicans to require voting centers to remain open for longer.
