Hobbs–Lake Arizona Governors Race Still Tight

Hobbs–Lake Arizona Governors Race Still Tight
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs (L) and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R). (The Epoch Times)
Melanie Sun
11/13/2022
Updated:
11/14/2022
0:00

The latest update from the Maricopa County Elections Department has Katie Hobbs and Kari Lake still closely tied in the battle for Arizona’s governorship.

According to the unofficial result update for the county posted at 6:18 p.m. MT on Sunday, adding another 1,472,786 ballots to the tally, Hobbs saw an increase of 44,111 votes while Lake secured 53,022—a net gain of 8,911 votes for Lake.

Katie Hobbs led by 26,011 votes as of 7:12 p.m. MT.

While Hobbs remains in the lead at 52 percent of the vote with a predicted 94 percent counted, there still remain an estimated 94,285 votes to be counted.

With two of the state’s most populous counties still counting votes, an update from Pima County is expected around 4 p.m. Monday.

On Sunday, Pima County tabulated another 11,986 ballots, leaving an estimated 41,404 remaining, with an estimated 90 percent of the count complete.

Many who did not want to leave their ballots in ballot boxes for others to count left their voting centers to try to vote elsewhere.

Maricopa officials expect to have most of the remaining votes counted by Wednesday. The process has been slow, they said, because the early voting ballots dropped off on Election Day need to have their signatures verified and get manually taken out of envelopes by two-person teams. There have been 70 percent more such ballots this time than in 2020.

Other Races

In the race for state treasurer, Republican Kimberly Yee declared a win after securing a clear majority. Democrat Adrian Fontes has been declared the winner of the race for secretary of state after also maintaining a large lead.

On Friday, Democrat Mark Kelly was declared the winner of Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat. He lead Republican Blake Masters by 127,746 votes as of Sunday night in the unofficial tally.

The race for attorney general remains hotly contested, with Republican hopeful Abraham Hamadeh closing in on Democrat Kris Mayes’s lead, with now 11,328 votes between them with 93 percent of the vote counted.

Petr Svab contributed to this report.