by STEPHEN KRUISER
Ms. Lake, however, is not quite ready to move on from her first election, which is a good thing. More on that in a minute. Ryan wrote about the latest development here in the Grand Canyon State:
With thin margins, most major decision desks have called the Arizona gubernatorial race in favor of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, but Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake announced Thursday morning that she’s not yet ready to concede.
In a video message posted to her Twitter account, captioned with “Arizona, we are still in the fight,” Lake addressed what she described as a “broken election system” and vowed to continue to fight to prove that something seems to have gone terribly wrong.I honestly don’t think this is a tilting-at-windmills vanity project for Lake. She has a very good legal team. We’re not dealing with the Lin Wood/Sidney Powell “Release the Kraken” nonsense of 2020. If they think there is something to look at, then there is probably something to look at.
At the very least, I hope the fact that Lake and her team are continuing to keep the spotlight on Maricopa County might shame county election officials into overhauling procedures that have been a laughingstock for three elections in a row now. It’s the largest county in the state and it has been running elections like a bunch of backwoods drunks. As Ryan notes in his post, Maricopa County officials are getting a little chippy about Lake’s persistence.
In his Election Night Drunkblog, my friend VodkaPundit pointed out that Florida was so embarrassed by what happened in the 2000 presidential election that it immediately revamped its election laws and procedures and continues to do so to this day. That’s why a state with over 21 million people was able to count all of its votes on Election Night. Maricopa County has around 4.5 million people and couldn’t get it done in a week.
I do think a lot of the problem here in Arizona is that the state GOP is dysfunctional and unfocused. If left to their own devices, they’d still be trying to get Martha McSally elected to something.
There was, however, something not right about what happened with the machines in Maricopa County on Election Day. It is an established fact that most Republicans are Election Day voters and, as I mentioned a couple of times last week, by far the greatest concentration of Republican voters in the state is in Maricopa County. Here in thoroughly blue Pima County, the tabulation machines were humming along to perfection.
It may have been that the election officials in Maricopa County simply didn’t prepare as rigorously as they should have. If so, why not?
Kari Lake isn’t the only one who wants answers. I don’t know that there is a path for her to actually end up as governor, but I do know that she can do the state party and a dispirited Republican electorate in Arizona a great service by not letting these people off the hook until changes are made, heads are rolling, or both.
The process is supposed to be, people cast votes and the votes get counted. Yeah, the GOP needs to be more attuned to the methods of election fraud and how to detect and prevent it, but, damnit, that’s not their job and it shouldn’t be necessary.
I am sick of all this chaos caused by Democrats and their incessant attempts (often successfully) to steal elections they are losing because of their terrible, failed, disastrous and anti-American policies and agenda.