After more than two weeks after Election Day, Arizona still has not called the election for the Attorney General Race, which is headed for a recount. Decision Desk HQ shows that over an estimated 99 percent of the vote has been counted, and that Democrat Kris Mayes has 50.01 percent of the vote to Republican Abe Hamadeh's 49.99 percent, with 510 votes separating them. On Tuesday night, Hamadeh announced he was suing Hayes, Democrat Katie Hobbs who served as secretary of state before her narrow win as governor, and various local election officials. The RNC is also joining in on the lawsuit, as they have with other lawsuits to do with these Arizona elections.
Arizonans demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials. I will not stop fighting until ALL voters receive justice.
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) November 23, 2022
See you in court. pic.twitter.com/5jJ6WWt8IK
As The New York Times explained:
Mr. Hamadeh and the R.N.C., in their complaint, ask the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the secretary of state from certifying Ms. Hayes as the winner and an order declaring Mr. Hamadeh the winner. The suit argues that equipment failures and errors in the management of polling places and in ballot tabulation led to an incorrect final vote count. It says there was no “fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,” but it claims there were mistakes that affected the final tally, given the contest’s narrow margin.
The suit asks the court to allow additional votes to be counted, including 146 provisional ballots and 273 mail-in ballots that were segregated because the election system showed they came from voters who had already cast in-person ballots. It does not seek a rerun of the election, though it does claim that Mr. Hamadeh should be declared the winner. By state law, Arizona’s secretary of state is required to certify the results of the election by Dec. 5.
The article mentions early on that the election is already going to a recount with how close it is.
It also makes it a point to call out election deniers, as so many Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media are prone to do, though they often only call out one side. "Arizona has come into the spotlight as one of the last battlegrounds of the 2022 midterms for those who have long made false accusations about the integrity of election systems. Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, has vowed to keep fighting even as the election results show she lost by more than 17,000 votes. Her campaign has explicitly called for the election to be conducted again," the piece mentions.
There is brief mention of the rampant election mishandling in Maricopa County, where local election officials are defendants in the case. It is given a mere few sentences though, and the piece even tries to undermine the issues.
As Katie highlighted on Monday, the Lake campaign has told election officials in Maricopa County to "preserve documents" and Lake herself gave an update how she planned to keep fighting.
My message to the People of Arizona & the United States: pic.twitter.com/mtNBl7728S
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 21, 2022
Arizona's Attorney General Mark Brnovich has also called out Maricopa County. As Katie also covered, Brnovich sent a letter to Maricopa County Civil Division Chief Thomas Liddy over the weekend referencing how complaints of voter disenfranchisement and election handling, due to machines not working, "go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law."
This is not mentioned in The New York Times report about Hamadeh's lawsuit. A search of the website shows it does not appear they covered Brnovich's letter at all.
See Decision Desk HQ's results below.
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