Arizona vote won’t be limited

PHOENIX — A judge Thursday rejected Republican demands to immediately limit vote counts in the razorclose U.S. Senate race in Arizona and has set a hearing on the challenge affecting about 5,600 votes in the state’s most populous county.

Judge Margaret R. Mahoney said it was too soon to require Maricopa and other counties to stop contacting voters to verify signatures on mail ballots.

Mahoney scheduled a hearing Friday and indicated she would rule then.

The lawsuit came hours before Democrat Kyrsten Sinema jumped into a slight lead over Republican Martha McSally in the midst of the slow vote count. Sinema is ahead by about 9,000 votes out of 1.9 million counted so far. About 400,000 remain to be counted in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake.

The suit alleges that the state’s county recorders don’t follow a uniform standard for allowing voters to address problems with their mail-in ballots, and that Maricopa and Pima counties improperly allow the fixes for up to five days after Election Day. Sinema has gained votes recently from Maricopa, and Pima is a Democratic bastion.

Currently, several other counties that lean Republican destroy mail ballots if voters don’t help verify their signatures before polls close on Election Day.

Recorder Adrian Fontes, the official in charge of counting ballots in Maricopa County, home to 60 percent of Arizona voters, said his office would not finish tallying votes for another week.

In other postmidterm elections developments:

• Republican Brian Kemp resigned Thursday as Georgia’s secretary of state, removing himself from the ongoing count of the governor’s election he says he’s already won.

“We won a clear and convincing victory,” Kemp said of returns showing him with 50.3 percent of almost 4 million votes, about a 63,000-vote lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Abrams maintains there are enough uncounted ballots to force a December runoff.

The Associated Press has not called the governor’s race.

• An estimated 113 million Americans cast ballots in the midterm election, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. That represents the highest raw vote total for a nonpresidential election in U.S. history and the highest overall participation in a midterm election in a half-century.

• As of 6 p.m. EST Thursday, The Associated Press had not yet declared winners in 12 races for U.S. House.