Here are the counties to watch as Lake and Hobbs go down to wire in Arizona
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Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake are separated by less than a percentage point in Arizona’s too-close-to-call gubernatorial race, and hundreds of thousands of votes are yet to be counted.
Eyes are turning to county election officials as they parse through remaining ballots over the next few days, with an estimated 31 percent of the state’s total votes yet to be counted as of Thursday morning.
Hobbs holds a slim lead of 0.6 percentage points, or roughly 13,000 votes, in the race.
The state’s Senate race also has not yet been called, although Sen. Mark Kelly (D) leads Republican Blake Masters by a more comfortable 5-point margin, or roughly 95,000 votes.
The vast majority of Arizona’s 15 counties have yet to report some of their votes, according to The New York Times’s estimates, but two counties in particular will comprise a substantial share of the remaining ballots: Maricopa County and Pima County.
Maricopa County
Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and much of the surrounding area, typically gets outsized attention in the battleground state’s elections because of its size, and this year is no different.
Maricopa is the state’s largest county, comprising nearly 62 percent of Arizona’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
That makes Arizona a highly centralized state, with Maricopa ranking third among the roughly 3,000 counties nationwide with regards to the share of their state’s population.
The county’s margin is critical to determining the winner of the state.
Former President Trump won Arizona in 2016 as he led in Maricopa County by 3 percentage points. Four years later, Trump narrowly lost the state to President Biden and trailed by 2 points in the county.
Hobbs and Kelly led their GOP opponents in the county by about 4 and 5 percentage points as of Thursday morning, respectively.
Officials in Maricopa County estimated on Wednesday that roughly 428,000 ballots had yet to be counted there, suggesting nearly all will be tabulated by Friday evening.
The county’s recorder said those remaining ballots include 136,000 early votes dropped off between Friday and Monday and 275,000 that were dropped off on Election Day itself.
Election officials on Wednesday evening reported the results of 62,034 of those outstanding ballots, and both Hobbs and Kelly slightly outran their Republican opponents in the new batch.
The remaining Maricopa ballots also include 17,000 in-person Election Day votes that were set aside due to printing issues at about a quarter of Maricopa’s polling places, which caused malfunctions with voting machines.
County election officials say the votes, which represent about 7 percent of those cast on Tuesday in person, were sent to a central facility for tabulation and will still be counted, but election fraud conspiracies quickly spread.
Republicans had attempted to extend voting in Maricopa at an emergency court hearing on Tuesday night because of the issues, but a state judge denied the motion, saying he had seen no evidence that anyone was denied an opportunity to vote.
Lake has railed against the malfunctions, blaming it on “incompetence” among election officials at her election night rally.
Maricopa Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates pushed back on Lake’s criticisms on Wednesday.
“I do not believe that what happened yesterday can be fairly called incompetence or corruption in any way,” Gates told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Pima County
Pima County, which is located south of Maricopa County, comprises about 14 percent of Arizona’s population, making it the state’s second largest county by population.
The New York Times estimates 63 percent of the vote in the county has been reported, a figure that trails every other county in the state.
Pima County is historically Democratic-leaning. Biden won the county by 19 points in 2020, and Hillary Clinton did so by 13 points four years earlier.
Hobbs and Kelly were leading by 20 and 24 points in Pima as of Thursday morning, respectively.
Officials in Pima said late Wednesday afternoon that they have yet to report the results of 159,570 ballots.
The vast majority of those votes — about 156,000 — include early ballots and 2,400 are provisional ballots. Election officials said they have 1,170 other ballots yet to be counted, although it’s unclear how they were submitted.
The delays in reporting the remaining results are in part because of verification procedures. Election officials individually verify signatures on submitted mail ballots against those in the voter registration system.
The remaining ballots in Maricopa and Pima counties combined represent roughly 62 percent of the remaining votes, per Associated Press’s estimates.
Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly told reporters vote counting in Pima could stretch into next week.
“We’re looking at the 14th or 15th those are the days that we’re optimistically looking. The 14th but realistically, likely the 15th,” she said, KGUN reported.
Source: TEST FEED1
