Democrat Katie Hobbs has extended her lead over Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s tightly contested gubernatorial race.
With 82% of votes in, Hobbs, the current secretary of state, leads with 50.7% of the vote as Lake, a former TV news anchor, trails with 49.3%. The winner will become the state’s fifth female governor.
Lake has said she’s confident she will win, and Hobbs, a former state lawmaker, asked supporters to be patient in a statement on election night.
The race could head into an automatic government-mandated recount if the results are within a half of a percent. State lawmakers changed the threshold for triggering an automatic recount following then-candidate Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 win.
Election officials have reported that ballot-counting in the state is slowed by the need to match signatures on mail-in ballots to voter registration signatures. A large number of ballots were also delivered on Election Day, rather than in early voting.
Reuters reported Thursday that Arizona workers in the state’s most populous county had a backlog of more than 400,000 uncounted ballots and would continue to work through the weekend counting ballots.
Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1996 with about 10,000 more votes than then-President Donald Trump. Hobbs currently leads Lake by more than 26,000 votes, more than Biden beat Trump by.
Polling throughout the campaign showed the governor’s race was competitive, and it attracted major surrogates, including Trump and former President Barack Obama, who both campaigned in the state. The race remains uncalled because Lake still has a path to victory.
Lake, a former TV news host at Fox 10 in Phoenix for 22 years, resigned from journalism last year and announced her campaign. She was among Trump’s early endorsements and said she wouldn’t have certified the Arizona’s 2020 election results if she were governor.
Lake has cast doubt on the reliability of Arizona’s elections and criticized Hobbs over how her office has handled elections.
On Tuesday, tabulating machines at about 60 voting locations had printing issues. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, said at a press conference voters were still able to drop off their ballots and that no eligible voter was turned away.
Lake suggested Tuesday that problems at polling places were located in conservative communities. Her campaign along with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters’ campaign filed a lawsuit to push the time polls closed from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., but Judge Timothy Ryan rejected the suit. Ryan said the court didn’t find evidence any voters weren’t able to vote because of the tabulating machines, according to the Arizona Republic.
Masters trails Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in the Senate race. With 82% of the vote in, Kelly leads with 51.7% to Masters’ 46.1%.
