Maricopa County's controversial voting malfunction decisive for Arizona governorship
The Arizona county is the second largest electoral district in the country. In the 2020 presidential elections, controversy has arisen claiming that there was electoral fraud.
In Maricopa County, Ariz., some of the 17,000 votes affected by tabulation system failures still remain uncounted. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates promised to "get to the bottom" of the problem and assured that "all ballots will be counted securely and accurately."
These votes began to be counted Wednesday along with some 90,000 ballots that arrived by mail. The results of the Arizona gubernatorial race between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs are still pending, as is the Senate race between Mark Kelly (D) and Blake Masters (R).
Sixty polling places affected
Early Tuesday morning, it was reported that the tabulators (the machines that read the ballots) in about 60 voting centers registered problems with the paper, which did not allow some ballots to be read properly.
Kari Lake immediately took to social media to inform voters of the steps to follow in the event of problems at their polling place.
According to the Gates, the machines had been used previously and had worked properly during the primaries:
Gates later claimed that all votes will be counted, apologized to voters for the inconvenience, and stated that what happened should not be "used to question the integrity of the election":
Maricopa County is the second largest congressional district in the country. It has been under national scrutiny since the 2020 presidential election due to the emergence of controversies regarding electoral fraud.
GOP lawsuit
The Lake and Masters campaigns along with the Republican National Committee (RNC) have sued the county over the voting problems. The complaint sought to keep the polls open longer and also asked that the state court "instruct the inspector at every polling location that voters whom the e-pollbook have recorded as having previously voted in this election must be permitted to complete and cast a provisional ballot."
GOP / Maricopa by Voz Media on Scribd
The complaint was rejected by a judge who argued that the court had no evidence that there were voters who were prevented from exercising their right to vote.
Although the results are not yet conclusive, Lake assured that she would win the election: