A recount of votes in a neck-and-neck Arizona election on Thursday confirmed the victory of Democratic attorney general candidate Kris Mayes over GOP candidate Abe Hamadeh. But for some diehard election-denying Republicans, the recount was further “evidence” that the right had actually won the state.
While most Republicans have accepted the results of a lackluster midterm election for their party, Arizona has remained a holdout for election deniers, with out-of-state conspiracy theorists camping out in Phoenix to claim fraud and demand a new election. A new election isn’t in the charts, but close margins on several races triggered an automatic recount. The recount results, released Thursday, upheld all the previous election outcomes. But the attorney general race, where Mayes’ margin of victory decreased by 231 votes, was enough to rekindle fraud allegations on the right.
Mayes and her Republican challenger Hamadeh fought one of Arizona’s closest races. Out of nearly 2.51 million votes cast in their election, just 511 votes separated the candidates when the race was first called. Arizona law requires a recount when a candidate wins by 0.5 percent of the votes or less.
Mayes’ lead shrank by 231, largely due to uncounted votes from Pinal County, which attributed the issue to “human error.”
Democratic Arizona Attorney General Candidate Kris Mayes speaks to supporters at an election night watch party at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on November 08, 2022 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Christian Petersen/Getty Images
For some Republican supporters, Mayes’ shrinking lead is a smoking gun for more votes to be found for their candidate.
But minor human errors at county levels are not unheard of in elections. A similarly sized slipup happened in 2019, under the supervision of MAGA-loving Colorado clerk Tina Peters, whose office lost a box of more than 570 uncounted ballots. Unlike in Pinal County, her office’s error was not discovered until after the election. (Peters went on to become a vocal denialist of the 2020 presidential election, and accused her fellow Republicans of cheating when she lost a primary election this year.)
“The purpose of a recount is to ensure accurate vote totals are put forth, as it is reasonable to expect some level of human error in a dynamic, high-stress, deadline intensive process involving counting hundreds of thousands of ballots,” Pinal County said in a statement, adding that the error “amounts to a .35% variance across a total County-wide vote count of around 146,000 casted ballots. In other words, the recount demonstrated that Pinal County exhibited an election consistency rate of 99.65%. Although not perfect, this consistency rate is within the State’s predetermined .5% statutory margin.”
Pinal County, a conservative district, was already undergoing shakeups in its election team, KTAR noted. The county’s elections director resigned after August’s primary election, during which the county had ballot shortages at some polling sites.
Despite the Thursday recount upholding Mayes’ win, some conspiracy theorists have latched onto it as evidence of broader election-fraud schemes by Democrats.
Following early reports of the recount numbers, a Twitter account for the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted a GIF of a dam breaking. Lake, who lost her election, has baselessly accused Democrats of fraud in the election. (On Saturday, a judge dismissed Lake’s lawsuit that sought to overturn election results.) When a Lake fan tweeted that “this could be exactly what we need to break this entire thing apart and vindicate all the so called ‘election deniers,’” Lake’s campaign account responded that “we believe it’s legit.”
Lake’s campaign also tweeted a gif of a collapsing house of cards with the caption “Live look at
[governor-elect] @katiehobbs and the corrupt Arizona election apparatus.”Hamadeh has called for a hand count of the race and a pause on Mayes’ inauguration. He tweeted on Thursday that his legal team is exploring its options.
But he has not declared fraud, nor personally declared himself the race’s rightful winner. Still, on Thursday night, he retweeted a post from Lake’s campaign that claimed he “was running against a complete lunatic lefty (@krismayes) who was more interested in fighting the climate than fighting crime. And Abe WON.”
Hamadeh’s campaign did not return a request for comment on whether he also still believes he won the race.
