With more than 100,000 votes yet to be counted, Kari Lake still leads the Republican gubernatorial primary against opponent Karrin Taylor Robson.
Only 5,360 votes were counted Wednesday, the day after the primary election.
Lake currently leads by a margin of 46.2 percent to 44.4 percent.
Some of those outstanding votes are in Maricopa County.
“Unofficial results are updated and 715,949 ballots have been counted. We still have to count the rest of the verified early ballots dropped off on Election Day, verified provisional ballots, & write-in candidates. We’ll post more results Thursday after 7pm,” the Maricopa County Elections Department said Wednesday night.
Unofficial results are updated and 715,949 ballots have been counted. We still have to count the rest of the verified early ballots dropped off on Election Day, verified provisional ballots, & write-in candidates. We'll post more results Thursday after 7pm https://t.co/iARFPkoxOB pic.twitter.com/RZOYx0dIRy
— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) August 4, 2022
The county itself has pleaded for patience.
“Election workers are your neighbors, people who go to the same churches and parks and grocery stores as you, people whose kids play with your kids. They take their responsibility seriously. A request: have some faith in them,” Maricopa County said on its official Twitter account.
Election workers are your neighbors, people who go to the same churches and parks and grocery stores as you, people whose kids play with your kids. They take their responsibility seriously. A request: have some faith in them. @MaricopaVote
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) August 4, 2022
Maricopa has been heavily scrutinized for its handling of the 2020 election.
Recently, Republican leadership in the county unanimously passed a resolution rejecting the 2020 election results.
For her part, Lake has already declared victory.
“We knew early in the night [Tuesday], despite a 9.8% deficit, that Kari Lake would be the Republican nominee,” Lake Chief Strategist Bill Grant told The Arizona Sun Times Wednesday morning. “It’s time to unite Arizona and bring the Republican Party together to defeat Katie Hobbs in November.”
Her campaign said Monday, before the primary election, that it expected to win.
“We feel highly confident. Kari is working hard traveling to all corners of the state. We had a huge rally with over 1,000 people in Tucson last night. And last week five polls came out with Kari leading by double digits,” Grant told The Sun Times Monday. “Combined with Robson‘s private jet and state plane scandal, we couldn’t ask for a better last week of the campaign.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Image “Election Workers” by Maricopa County Elections Department.
this is so they can find missing ballots in a drawer a suit case or the truck of a car and guess what none for Kari
This is crazy. Back in the day of paper ballots and #2 pencils, everything was wrapped up by 3am the morning after election day. Now, we’re stuck in a slow-motion time machine, waiting for someone to “discover” missing boxes of ballots in the back of some operative’s car trunk.