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PHOENIX, Ariz.—The polls closed in Arizona on Tuesday, but voters will likely have to wait several more days before they know whether their next governor will be Republican Kari Lake or Democrat Katie Hobbs. That’s because more than 570,000 ballots have yet to be counted, most of them in Maricopa County, where more than 60% of the state’s registered voters live.
Arizona officials inched marginally closer to a final vote count on Thursday, when Maricopa County released the latest batch of roughly 78,000 mail ballots that were received on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Those ballots, which were expected to be cast mostly by Democrats, extended Hobbs’ lead slightly over Lake; as of Thursday night, Hobbs was ahead by fewer than 27,000 votes.
But the race is hardly decided. Still outstanding are roughly 17,000 in-person Election Day votes, tens of thousands of more mail ballots, and a critical mass of 290,000 mail ballots that were delivered in person on Election Day.
It’s that last batch that appears to have blindsided Maricopa County election officials, who only received roughly 170,000 such ballots in the last presidential election. Handling so many mail ballots submitted on Election Day has thrown an element of chaos into the count, as mailed ballots typically take longer to process and tabulate. Early on Thursday, the campaigns had been expecting that Maricopa County would have tallied much of those 290,000 ballots by that evening. Later in the day, however, officials revealed the counting could stretch into next week.
Both campaigns as well as Arizona political insiders on both sides of the aisle say those 290,000 ballots will likely determine the hotly-contested race between Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, and Lake, a former local TV news anchor.
Republican and Democratic sources expect those votes to lean…
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Source : time
