Certify the Arizona Elections

National Review Online

Thursday, December 01, 2022

 

Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election didn’t inspire a wave of imitators in 2022. Across the country, candidates from both parties who lost elections by margins big and small almost unanimously conceded — and did so gracefully. That included many candidates who had indulged Trump’s 2020 election conspiracies, with one glaring exception — Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is now auditioning to become the Stacey Abrams of the Republican Party.

 

“The whole system is a joke. And either our courts help us out right now, or I fear we lose this country,” Lake said in a recent interview with Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

 

“We know we won this election, and we are going to do everything in our power to make sure that every single Arizonan’s vote that was disenfranchised is counted,” Lake told another interviewer last week.

 

In fact, Lake lost her election to Democrat Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 total votes (0.7 percent of the vote). That’s a narrow loss for Lake — about the same margin by which Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Donald Trump in 2016 — but not anywhere close enough to put the outcome in doubt.

 

This is not to deny that there were real problems in Arizona on Election Day. In Maricopa County, there were widespread problems with tabulators — that is, vote-counting machines — but malfunctioning tabulators at vote centers did not mean citizens could not cast ballots. It simply meant ballots would be counted later at a central location.

 

As the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors explained in a video released the morning of Election Day, if a voter could not have his ballot scanned by the tabulator, he could simply place the ballot in a secure lockbox beneath the tabulator — known as a “Door 3 lockbox” — and the ballots would be sent to Maricopa election headquarters that night to be counted. According to the Maricopa County Board of Elections, a total of 16,724 ballots were placed in these secure boxes and sent to a central location for counting.

 

A report released by the Maricopa County Elections Department noted that the use of the secure lockbox has been “a decades-long practice,” but some voters were discouraged from using them because “many high profile and influential individuals instructed voters to not deposit their ballots in Door 3.”

 

Who were these “high profile and influential” individuals? One was Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party. Ward, who has a well-established weakness for conspiracy theories, tweeted on Election Day: “DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN ‘BOX 3’ TO BE TABULATED DOWNTOWN.” Charlie Kirk tweeted a similar message.

 

If there were any errors in counting the ballots placed in these “Door 3 boxes,” those errors will be discovered and corrected in the impending recount in the Arizona attorney general’s race — an election in which the two candidates are separated by 510 votes. But there is no chance such errors could make up Lake’s 17,000-vote deficit. According to a routine election audit, there was only a minuscule variance between the number of voters who checked in at vote centers and the number of votes counted in Maricopa: Only 14 of the 223 vote centers had a variance of greater than three and “none greater than 22,” according to the Maricopa County Elections Department.

 

Despite the malfunctioning tabulators, the overwhelming majority of vote centers did not experience long lines on Election Day. “In the 2022 General Election, Election Day voters waited in line an average of six minutes,” according to the Maricopa County report. Out of 223 centers in the county where any registered voter could cast a ballot, only seven locations “experienced a wait time between 80 minutes [and] 115 minutes,” according to the report, but each “of these locations had one or more nearby Vote Centers within a few miles that had a wait-time ranging from 1 minute to 25 minutes during the period they were experiencing their longest wait-times.”

 

A November 27 letter, written by Thomas Liddy of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office on behalf of the county’s board of supervisors, persuasively explains why the malfunctioning tabulators did not amount to a violation of Arizona’s constitution. The key point in the letter is that “all voters were still provided reasonable, lawful options for voting.” He noted that eight of Arizona’s 15 counties “do not have any tabulators in their polling locations at all,” so it “cannot be the case that the limited use of the Door 3 ballot box for some voters in Maricopa County violates the Constitution, while the required use of a ballot box by every voter in over half of the state’s counties does not.”

 

It is worth noting that Liddy reports directly to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, who won her countywide election this November by six percentage points. This fact does not suggest there’s some sort of elaborate conspiracy against Lake; rather, it helps disprove it.

 

Mitchell is the woman who was handpicked by Senate Republicans to question Christine Blasey Ford during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation fight. Despite being reviled by the professional Left for asking questions and writing a report that poked holes in the testimony of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Mitchell easily prevailed in Maricopa County. Republican congressman David Schweikert, a member of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, won his redrawn Maricopa-based congressional district by 0.9 points just two years after Joe Biden carried it by 1.5 points. And Republican Kimberly Yee, Arizona’s state treasurer, carried Maricopa by ten points.

 

Lake, however, lost Maricopa by two points, while GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters lost Maricopa to Democratic senator Mark Kelly by six points. What explains these various electoral outcomes in Maricopa County are the relative merits and flaws of the various candidates in the eyes of Maricopa County voters.

 

This past Monday was the deadline for Arizona’s 15 counties to certify election results, and each county did so except one. Overwhelmingly Republican Cochise County refused to certify results to protest the electoral problems in Maricopa County. This unprecedented refusal is now being taken up by the courts. If Cochise County officials were to persist, they would simply be disenfranchising their own voters. They should reverse course and certify the results in their own county before the December 5 deadline for state officials to certify results.

 

There were legitimate problems in Maricopa County on Election Day, but none that justify overturning the gubernatorial election and none that justify Kari Lake’s refusal to concede. Lake, like Stacey Abrams before her, is free to embarrass herself for as long as she wants. But why would any other Republicans want to join her as sore losers?