Lake weighing options after losing Ariz. governor’s race
PHOENIX — Refusing to concede, Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, said Thursday she is assembling lawyers and collecting evidence of voters having trouble casting ballots on Election Day as she considers her next move.
In a 2½-minute video, Lake made no mention of giving up in her most extensive public comments since losing the election. Before the election, she had refused to say she would concede if she lost the race to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
“Rest assured I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week,” Lake said. “I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs.”
She pointed to long lines at some polling places that were exacerbated by problems with ballot printers at about a third of the vote centers in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state. She said the problems disenfranchised voters who couldn’t wait at the polls.
“What happened to Arizonans on Election Day is unforgivable,” she said.
County election officials said that all ballots were counted and that voters could go to any polling place in the county, many of which had little to no line, with wait times posted online.
Election officials traced the problems to a printer setting that sometimes led to ballots printing too lightly for the on-site tabulators to read. They said they used the same settings in the August primary and for pre-election testing and there were no widespread issues.
About 17,000 ballots were not scanned at precinct-based vote counters and were instead placed in a collection box to be counted by more sophisticated machines at the county’s election headquarters. The collection box has come to be known as “box three.”
Bill Gates, Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, has blamed state GOP chair Kelli Ward and other prominent Republicans for causing delays by telling supporters not to use box three.