While it’s hard to sympathize with right wingers on pretty much everything, it’d be easy to see why they might be pretty fucking frustrated with the snail’s pace of the count in the Arizona Republican governor’s primary race between Kari Lake and Karrin Taylor Robson. As of 7:16 AM EDT on Wednesday the count stood at 81% reported, 636,593 votes tabulated. Now, as of 6:41 AM EDT on Thursday, the count stands at 82% percent reported, 657,038 votes tabulated.
How the hell did they count 636,593 votes in the first few hours after polls closed and then only 20,445 over roughly the next 24? Even weirder is how there’s a discrepancy between the reporting numbers in the statewide races. How could the Senate primary be 84% reported but the governor primary is 82%? What happened to that 2%? And this isn’t just the New York Times, because Politico says the same thing (albeit with the decimal points). And it’s not voters somehow leaving the governor pick blank while checking off a Senate candidate, because the Times shows 642,123 total votes for the Senate GOP primary, nearly 15,000 less than the governor’s race.
This is friggin weird although maybe it sticks out less to national media observers because Lake’s circa 12,000 vote lead over Taylor Robson has stayed pretty much the same in the last 24 hours. We obviously have no skin in this particular game, it’s going to be a tough race for Dem Secretary of State and gov nominee Katie Hobbs no matter which one of the MAGA candidates she faces, but it does not exactly bode well for November considering it’s more likely than not that the big matchups in Arizona come down to the wire just as it did between Biden and Trump back in 2020.