Kari Lake Calls ‘BS’ on Arizona Election Results

As the final vote totals trickle in from various counties in Arizona, Democrat Katie Hobbs has been declared the winner and the next Governor of the red-leaning state. Despite calls for Hobbs to recuse herself from the process as the sitting Secretary of State, she refused and will end up presiding over the certification of her own victory.

During the campaign, Hobbs came under great pressure for her decision to avoid debating Lake saying she wouldn’t dignify her opponent by appearing on stage with her. With the results still being finalized, plenty of controversy remains over voting machine issues in Maricopa County and the number of days it has taken to get everything counted:

Hobbs ran a low-key campaign against Lake and refused to debate her, saying she did not want to give the GOP nominee the opportunity to spread conspiracy theories.

She accused Lake of being “only interested in creating a spectacle.”

Lake in turn called Hobbs a “coward” for not debating.

“Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs said in a tweet after her victory was projected. “Thank you, Arizona. I am so honored and so proud to be your next Governor.”

In her own tweet, Lake wrote, “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”

As noted, Lake seems unready to concede the race for the moment as many questions still linger:

Arizonans know BS when they see it.

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 15, 2022

It’s unclear what Lake means by “BS” or what her campaign intends to do moving forward. There may be legal challenges after the vote is officially certified. While Lake’s “war room” team worked over the weekend examining results as they came in, it became clear that the momentum she was expecting to materialize from Election Day mail-in ballots never panned out:

Lawyers, political operatives and other people around the Republican nominee worked over the weekend and through Monday from a “war room” inside a Scottsdale resort to prepare Lake for what they had come to expect would be a stinging loss to Hobbs, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private details. Some campaign aides and Republican operatives, looking at internal data, had grown increasingly doubtful over the last several days that Lake had a path to victory.

Discussions have ranged from how Lake could acknowledge a loss to whether she should adopt Trump’s playbook and claim the election was stolen from her. Some want her message to center on problems with printers on Election Day that affected 30 percent of polling sites.

Lake will be treading lightly here since it’s unlikely her future in politics will end with this race. There were voting irregularities with mail-in voting and in-person voting in several parts of the state. Those issues should be investigated and adjudicated to prevent future problems. The question is whether those issues were enough to alter the outcome of the vote tallies.

There’s no debate that Arizona’s election laws are messy and need to be reformed. The very fact that many voters were forced to drop off mail-in ballots in-person on Election Day, creating a massive backlog and bottleneck in the system is an embarrassment. Florida, among others, has a much larger population and yet manages to produce results within hours. Of course, Florida was the epicenter of “hanging chads” back during the 2000 election so they’ve had time to fix their system as well.

Once again, add some more bad polling to the bad polling hall of fame. In the final weeks of the Arizona Governor’s race, Lake was putting up some solid numbers from several pollsters that weren’t matching reality.