The Horse Race: After Kari Lake's Defeat, Some Arizona Republicans Cling to Election Denialism

with Brittany Bernstein

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

After Kari Lake's Defeat, Some Arizona Republicans Cling to Election Denialism

It's 2020 all over again in Arizona.

The midterm elections have come and gone, and elections officials have reassured Arizonans the voting was free and fair, but bad actors are still clinging to voter-fraud allegations.

Failed Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is claiming her election was stolen — unsurprisingly, after months of repeating Trump's 2020 "stop the steal" rhetoric on the campaign trail.

With every vote counted, Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Lake by more than 17,116 votes, or seven-tenths of a percentage point.

Jim Geraghty offers this context:

If all of those voters formed their own town, they would be the 45th-largest town in the state of Arizona. For perspective, that margin is a larger number of votes than the margin of victory in 37 U.S. House races in 2020.

Nonetheless, Lake has said Maricopa County should delay certification of the 2022 election and called for an investigation into the tabulator troubles the county faced on Election Day.

"I am focused like a laser beam focus on Arizona & election integrity. We have to take on this fight. . . . We know we WON this election & we are going to do everything in our power to make sure that every single Arizonan's vote that was disenfranchised is counted," Lake said during an appearance on Real America's Voice Friday.

However, the county said in a report released on Sunday that tabulator issues did not undermine the voting process: "While Maricopa County's printer issue in 2022 impacted more Vote Centers than normal, every voter was afforded the ability to legally and securely cast their ballot."

The report adds that while 31 percent of polling places in the county experienced printing problems that led to issues with the tabulators' ability to read the ballots, it was not the issues themselves but the misinformation spread by political commentators and figures that may have discouraged voters.

Caroline Downey reports:

As printer issues were reported that morning, Maricopa County defaulted to its alternative manual voting method at affected polling locations. The county claimed it clearly communicated to the public through news releases on social media that voters could place completed ballots into the secure ballot box below the tabulator known as "Door 3." Those ballots were then sent to the central counting facility for tabulation, a process "so common that every Arizona county either uses it as their only method of counting Election Day ballots or as a backup plan like Maricopa County."

"The secure Door 3 option has been a decades-long practice in Maricopa County. Despite this being a legal, secure, and reliable voting option, many high profile and influential individuals instructed voters to not deposit their ballots in Door 3," the report said. As a result, some residents refused to vote, according to the report.

Maricopa County's board of supervisors voted unanimously to certify the county's election results on Monday. Ahead of the vote, the board held a two-hour meeting in which speakers grew heated as they shared election-conspiracy theories. One speaker called the board members "traitors" and suggested they may have committed treason "punishable by the death penalty," per the New York Times.

Despite the unanimous vote in Maricopa County, two Republican members of the Cochise County board of supervisors have refused to certify that county's own results in protest of the tabulator issues in Maricopa County, voting to delay certification until Friday.

"Our small counties, we're just sick and tired of getting kicked around and not being respected," Cochise supervisor Peggy Judd told the New York Times.

Judd and Tom Crosby, the other Republican on the three-member board, have spent a month trying to audit the election results. A judge blocked a plan to hand-count all the county's ballots, a plan that the county's own attorney and elections director both warned was probably illegal.

The two Republican supervisors have suggested many voting machines in the state are technically illegal, despite that conspiracy having been dismissed by federal elections officials and the state's supreme court.

Ann English, the only Democratic supervisor in Cochise County, told me:

I have no justification for the Board breaking the law by insisting on 100% hand count after the election started and no process in place. I have no justification for the Board breaking the law by not certifying the Cochise County election which was without error.

When laws are broken there are consequences and I am waiting to see what those will be through the courts. I believe in the judicial system and I am willing to accept their decision.

Judd, meanwhile, did not tell the New York Times whether she planned to vote to certify the results on Friday and cited messages posted on the social-media platform Telegram when discussing what will happen if she and Crosby refuse to certify.

"What I've heard is that the Legislature will just have to take over," she said.

However, the issue would actually head to the state courts and could even leave the county's votes uncounted, according to Governor-elect Hobbs, the current Arizona secretary of state.

"The secretary of state calls them conspiracy theorists, but a theory is just a fact to be proven," Judd told the paper. "So maybe they'll be conspiracy facts one day."

AROUND NR

• Jim Geraghty on Biden 2024:

Axios reports that the White House is already pivoting to a schedule and approach that represents a soft open to President Biden's reelection bid. Biden's enjoying a renewed sense of confidence from the rest of his party after the midterms, but it's fair to ask whether Democrats did okay in the midterms because of Biden or in spite of him.

• "Joe Biden 2024 is a bad idea whose time has come," Rich Lowry writes, saying Democrats' surprisingly good performance on Election Night has Biden "looking revitalized."

Democrats consider Biden the safe choice in 2024, since he's the incumbent and surrounded by flawed alternatives, yet he is actually an enormous risk. Nominating him again would be extremely reckless, both for the party and for the country.

• Twitter CEO Elon Musk said he would support Ron DeSantis for president in 2024 if the Florida governor decides to run. "My preference for the 2024 presidency is someone sensible and centrist. I had hoped that would [be] the case for the Biden administration, but have been disappointed so far," Musk said on Twitter. More from Ari Blaff here.

• "The wheels have come off the Trump Train in the two years since the night he lost the 2020 election. The former president has become increasingly erratic." So says Andrew McCarthy, after Trump hosted Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, "a pair of disturbed young men who've publicly expressed antisemitic and, in Fuentes's case, racist views," at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump's capable advisers who kept him in line have come and gone.

We thus now find him frantically trying to put a benign spin on his dinner with Fuentes and Ye, . . . just as it seems like only yesterday he was frantically putting a benign spin on his stubborn recklessness in hoarding scores of classified documents at the same Palm Beach club (the subject of one federal investigation), . . . much like his benign spin on the Capitol riot (the subject of another federal investigation), . . . and on his phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (the subject of a state criminal investigation), . . . which was of a piece with his equally "perfect" phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (the subject of the first impeachment . . . that preceded the second impeachment). On it goes, and on it will go.

• With all eyes on Ron DeSantis as a potential 2024 alternative to Donald Trump, the Florida governor this week jumped into foreign affairs, condemning Apple's interference in the recent protests against President Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule and "zero-Covid" policy.

Caroline Downey reports:

The governor cited reports that "Apple is not allowing the protesters to use this Air Drop function" to communicate.

"That is obviously providing aid and comfort to the CCP," he said. "This zero-Covid policy is draconian, it violates people's liberties, and it is completely unscientific. And the people of China are right to be able to speak out and protest against what the Chinese Communist Party is doing," DeSantis said at the briefing.