Sinema continues to inch ahead in Senate
PHOENIX — Unless the trend in election returns shift — and soon — Arizona will get its first Democrat in the U.S. Senate in decades.
And the state Republican Party may be laying the groundwork for a legal challenge to stop that from happening.
New figures Saturday evening show Kyrsten Sinema has amassed 1,048,655 votes. That gives her a lead over Republican Martha McSally that now approaches 30,000.
Just a day earlier Sinema had a edge of about 20,200.
More to the point, Sinema is outpolling McSally in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, by close to 4 percent.
Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fones reports he still has another 198,000 ballots to tally. And assuming the current split among Sinema, McSally and Green Party candidate Angela Green continues, Sinema will pick up 99,000 of those to about 95,400 for McSally.
McSally had gained some ground with new reports from several rural counties. But that hasn’t been enough to offset how Sinema is doing elsewhere.
For example, Sinema is getting four votes for every three for McSally in Pima County. That is not unexpected, given the voter registration edge Democrats have there.
But it has been the vote tally out of Maricopa County that has alarmed the state GOP.
In a letter Saturday, party attorney Kory Langhofer demanded copies of all communications between Fontes’ office and Sinema, her campaign and what he essentially considers her perceived allies like billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer.
That demand follows the decision of Fontes to allow “emergency voting’’ on the Saturday and Monday before the election by people who said they could not show up at the polls on Tuesday. Fontes, along with Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez who also has allowed the practice, said the practice is authorized by state law.
And state GOP Chairman Jonathan Lines continues to complain about Fontes allowing people who voted by mail but whose signatures on the envelope do not match county records to “cure” the problem by contacting the recorder’s office.