Arizona: Maricopa County precincts with voting problems were not overwhelmingly Republican

As Lake continues to trail her rival Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and as the number remaining to be counted shrinks, these claims have been made. Hobbs was up 26.011 votes upon the release of a new batch of results on Sunday night, with only over 180,000 remaining.

The Hobbs campaign issued a statement after the latest figures were released that called her “the unequivocal favorite to become the next Governor of Arizona.”

“Katie has led since the first round of ballots were counted, and after tonight’s results, it’s clear that this won’t change,” said the statement, which was attributed to campaign manager Nicole DeMont.

Starting early on Election Day, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be read by vote-counting machines, which caused ballots to be rejected. Voters were forced to wait in lines, go to another location, or deposit their ballots into secure boxes. The ballots were then transferred to downtown Phoenix to be counted. Officials in the county say that no one was denied their right to vote.

The Post used data provided by Maricopa county election officials to identify the precincts affected voting locations. Next, the Post examined the voter registration breakdown in each precinct using L2, an election data source.

Analysis revealed that there is nearly the same proportion of registered Republicans in affected counties as the county’s share of registered Republicans, which is 36%.

A number of prominent Republicans suggested throughout the week that the problem with printers was limited to Republican areas.

Lake, addressing reporters after voting with her family at a site downtown, said, “There’s a reason we decided to change locations — we were going to go to a pretty Republican area.” Instead, she said, “We came right down to the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines.”

“And guess what?” she added. “They’ve had zero problems with their machines today. Today, not one machine produced a ballot. It was not one in this liberal area. So we were right to come and vote in a very liberal area.”

In fact, there were problems at locations in precincts that skew heavily Democratic, according to The Post’s analysis.

These included two elementary schools located in east Phoenix, and a south Phoenix health center. — All locations where the percentage of Democrats is greater than that of Republicans are affected by this 40 percent increase in Democrats. At the Mountain Park Health Center in south Phoenix, which was among the precincts that experienced issues with printers, there were nearly three times as many votes for Lake’s Democratic opponent, Hobbs, as there were for the Republican candidate, according to results released by the county.

A spokesperson for Lake Campaign did not respond to my request for comment.

Lake’s claims were amplified throughout the weekend by Trump, who wrote on Truth Social, the social media site set up by the former president and his allies, that “Even Kari Lake was taken to a Liberal Democrat district in order to vote.”

The former president used that assertion to push an unfounded claim that Maricopa County officials “stole” the election from Blake Masters, the GOP nominee for Senate. Masters was expected to lose his race Friday to Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat.

“So in Maricopa County they’re at it again. … but only in Republican districts,” wrote Trump, who made the county a target of his false claims of election fraud in 2020.

He concluded, “Do Election over again!”

Masters hinted at a similar demand in an appearance Friday on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, before his race was called by the Associated Press. “I think the most honest thing at this point would be for Maricopa County to wipe the slate clean, just take all the ballots and do a fresh count,” he said.

Masters claimed that the county had “mixed up” ballots on two occasions but did not offer a basis for that assertion. A campaign spokesperson did not respond to Masters’ request for evidence.

A spokeswoman for the county’s elections department said that poll workers at two locations had combined two batches of ballots but that “this has happened in the past, and we have redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.” Those redundancies, which include checking total ballots against check-ins at voting locations, are carried out “with political party observers present,” added the spokeswoman, Megan Gilbertson.

In a statement Masters posted the following tweet Saturday: Masters didn’t push for fraud claims, but said that he wouldn’t concede until all votes were counted.

Officials from Maricopa County have insisted that there were no glitches that caused any ballots to be misread, or prevented anyone from voting. They say they are working as long as 18 hours a day to process a record number of ballots dropped off on Election Day — and they have said for weeks that tabulation could take as many as 12 days.

“I’m going to stand up for my state,” Bill Gates, The Republican chairman of the county board, said this to reporters Friday afternoon. “We’re doing things the right way.”

Arizona Republican Party leaders maintain that the glitches were most detrimental to their voters because they tend to vote on Election Day. “It was no secret that Republicans intended to vote on Election Day,” the state party said in a statement issued on Sunday.

But The Post’s analysis found that the proportion of Republican Election Day voters in precincts with printer problems was virtually the same as the share in precincts countywide, bolstering the county’s argument that people in affected areas who wanted to vote on Tuesday were not prevented from doing so.

Lawyers for the party sought to have a judge order county officials to extend voting times by 3 hours on Tuesday night. This was due to mechanical issues. The judge refused the request just five minutes before polls close. He found that Republicans could not show that any voter was denied the right to vote.

Maricopa allows voters to vote at any polling station, regardless of where they live. It’s different from some systems that require people to cast their votes at designated locations near or in They live in their communities.

Voters who live in the suburbs and drive into downtown Phoenix for work, for example, can cast their ballots either near their home, in the city’s center or at schools, churches or any of the 223 polling locations set up throughout the vast county.

According to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, voting tends to be more convenient for people who live near their homes and are familiar with their daily lives.

“The vote centers are conveniently located, they’re part of your day, they may be on your route for all of your errands,” he said.

Bronner reported out of Washington. This report was contributed by Jon Swaine in Washington and Reis Thebault.