Even with all of the odd problems with machine malfunctions, the campaign of Republican Kari Lake has remained steadfast in the belief that Lake is going to secure a victory as the next Governor of Arizona.
Not everyone wants to get their hopes up high only to be crashed down to the ground. The American people have been through a lot in the last few years. So there is a lot of hope that Lake will win, and also a great deal of caution about the election results.
The Lake campaign is not giving up on the idea that a red wave in the desert of Arizona will still surprise the nation.
“We’re not in the business of spreading false hope. Our confidence hasn’t wavered & we haven’t moved an inch since election day. Kari Lake will be the next Governor of Arizona,” The Lake Campaign tweeted out Saturday.
But, of course, nothing is over until the winner is announced. Numerous people were busy working on analyzing the election results.
Gina Swoboda, from the Kari Lake campaign, told National File about specific things that concerned her the most, which she was watching out for.
The first thing was she is worried about the ballots that could not be read by the machine. Those ballots went into what is called ‘Door #3. And there were ballots that were copied with a low amount of printer toner that she was tracking, and she also was paying attention to the numbers of people who checked in to vote, had a problem with the machines, and then left without having their vote counted.
Swoboda’s concerns have paralleled the concerns of at least one election judge, Michele Swinick, from Maricopa, county who told reporters that in her area, the “tabulators all worked perfectly during the test the night before the election, but the problems with scanning began immediately with the first ballots of the day.”
Swinick said that voters scanned their ballots between 4 and 12 times with very minimal success and that 1 in 10 ballots was being read for the first three hours of voting.
Voters were given options to either spoil their ballots and try again or drop them into a different section called “Door 3″ to be tabulated later. There were so many ballots in Door 3 that a whole new situation had to be created to deal with emptying those bins and getting them to the right place to be counted.
Those are some of the ballots that need to be tabulated and are being adjudicated.
Both Swoboda and Swinick made media appearances Saturday to talk about their concerns about votes that may not end up being counted properly.
Others were busy crunching numbers and analyzing where votes were coming from.
Garrett Archer from ABC News in AZ, who was crunching numbers live on Facebook, said that Saturday Night was the last batch of votes that would favor the Democrats.
“Maricopa ballots will be that red thing,’ Charlie Kirk said. But the wave is going to come in slowly, pundits are saying, warning people to just stand by, saying that the wave will start Saturday night- and they were right. Batches of votes were being added.
Archer made sure to say that the race still could go either way, adding that it is his job to temper expectations.
Some numbers came down at 8 PM Eastern.
And there was no door #3 in that batch:
There were more counties adding up as well:
Coconino County has tabulated 4,473 ballots Est. 3,816 remain (93% complete), Pima County has tabulated 19,689 ballots Est. 53,397 remain (87% complete), both with favored Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Voters got a hint that the red wave idea had not crashed yet, when Swoboda appeared with Kirk and talked about the different groups or ‘buckets’ of votes that still need to be counted in Arizona, with there being 350,000 ballots by ‘4×4 voters’ which was very exciting to supporters of Lake. That was the number of votes cast by ‘high propensity voters’ meaning the chances of a large percentage of those ballots being for Lake were high, Swoboda indicated.
The interview went viral:
Landon Wall posted more details about why the votes are going to be more favorable for Lake as time goes on:
All pundits seemed to understand that something had flipped from the favor being in the direction of Hobbs, but each was unsure of how much was left of the wave in the uncounted ballots.
“Right now Kari Lake needs 57% of the ballots in the till, and it goes up to 60% of Maricopa ballots,” Archer said on Facebook. “I would be waiting to make any announcements, there are too many ballots out yet.”
Others were more openly optimistic, as Kirk tweeted almost the same thing that Archer said, but hinted at a little bit more excitement.
In the end, everyone agrees that Lake still has a chance of winning and that remaining hope in a ‘red wave’ isn’t completely dead yet- but how much they want to do a victory dance right now separates all of these pundits and political watchers.
“We had a historic turnout, and the election officials were not ready for how many voters turned out and wanted to vote. In one way, we have already seen the wave,” Swoboda told Frontline America, “I told everyone to expect that, but they didn’t listen.”
This story is developing.