Katie Hobbs widens lead over Kari Lake in Arizona as officials address counting delay

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has a slight lead against Republican former news anchor Kari Lake in Arizona’s race for governor on Thursday, as officials in Maricopa County addressed issues with counting ballots. Arizona has tabulated 1.9m votes, but 619,012 ballots remain uncounted. In addition, 339,191 need to be processed, while 16,740 provisional ballots remain to be processed. And 315,415 remain ready for tabulation.Ms Lake is one of the most outspoken promoters of former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. She has called for Arizona and Wisconsin’s election results to be decertified. On Wednesday evening, the elections office for Maricopa County, the largest county in the state, addressed what happened when polling places ran out of paper ballots, Fox News reported. Chairman Bill Gates and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman said that the matter would be investigated.’All ballots will be counted securely and accurately,’ they said in a joint statement. ‘Over the past 24 hours, we have learned more about the printer issue that caused some ballots to not be read at Vote Centers yesterday. While the issue impacted less than 7 per cent of Election Day voters (about 17,000 ballots), we understand that for people who went through it, this was frustrating, inconvenient, and not how they pictured Election Day.’The chairmen also addressed the on-demand printing machines that were operated during the primaries.’The printer settings for the Ballot-On-Demand printers at Vote Centers were the same ones we used in the August Primary. The paper was the same thickness. Prior to the General Election, the Elections Department test-printed and test-tabulated hundreds of ballots without issue,’ they said.Arizona is one of the closest-watched elections for governor in the country. Former president Donald Trump endorsed Ms Lake during the primary while outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey and former vice president Mike Pence supported her opponent. In addition, Arizona is still tabulating results for the closely watched Senate race between Senator Mark Kelly and venture capitalist Blake Masters, which could help determine control of the Senate.