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PHOENIX - The number of undecided statewide races is now down to one.
On Thursday, incumbent state schools chief Kathy Hoffman conceded in her bid to get a new four-year term to Republican Tom Horne even though the tight race might have brought an automatic recount.
But a Hoffman aide told Capitol Media Services she made the decision to concede because she saw no path to victory, even with a recount.
"We have confidence that our elections were run fairly and accurately,'' the statement read. And the aide said Hoffman believes the recount would not make up the difference.
A recount, however, is certain in the race for attorney general.
Democrat Kris Mayes on Thursday saw her lead shrink to fewer than 100 votes over Republican Abe Hamadeh. And given how the votes have been breaking between the two, there is virtually no chance either one will pick up enough of the uncounted ballots to take a sufficient lead to escape a recount.
A recount cannot take place until after the election is formally "canvassed,'' something scheduled for Dec. 5.
But the odds of major changes in the outcome are slim.
In Arizona, a recount simply involves the same ballots being fed back through the same equipment that was used to count them in the first place, albeit after a new round of accuracy testing. There is no hand counting involved.
All this comes as Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, has refused to concede even though she was trailing Thursday by more than 16,000 votes, far outside the margin to even get to an automatic recount.
"I am still in this fight with you,'' she said in a video posted Thursday on Twitter. And she repeated her claim, without any evidence, that the election system is broken because Katie Hobbs, who outpolled her in the race for governor, was allowed to keep her position of secretary of state which is the chief elections officer.
"The fox was guarding the henhouse,'' Lake said, disregarding the fact that each county is in charge of its own elections and counts its own ballots. "And because of that, voters have been disenfranchised.''
Lake also said the results showing her losing cannot be trusted because of the use of electronic voting machines. She cited the lawsuit she filed earlier this year along with Mark Finchem, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for secretary, to require ballots to be counted by hand.
U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi tossed out the claim saying that claims the machine can produce inaccurate results are little more than speculation on their part.
But Lake on Thursday said her fears about the voting machines proved "we were right,'' though not for the reasons she cited in the lawsuit.
Now Lake is claiming that problems with the tabulation machines in Maricopa County forced voters to wait in line, some for hours. And she insisted that "tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters were disenfranchised.''
Lake offered no evidence to back that claim.
It is true that some tabulation machines would not read some ballots that had been printed at vote centers.
In each case, however, the voter was given the option of inserting the ballots into a sealed drawer in the machine, to be taken to county election offices at the end of the day by a bipartisan group of election workers and counted there. But Bill Gates, who chairs the board of supervisors, said it was Lake and her allies who told supporters not to use what has become known as "drawer three,'' creating the long lines about which she is now complaining.
Lake, however, is still threatening litigation.
"I have assembled the best and brightest legal team,'' she said. "We are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done in the past week.''
Lake has not responded to multiple requests by Capitol Media Services to detail how she believes laws were broken and any legal theory that would allow a judge to throw out the results.
There actually was a lawsuit filed in connection with the problems with the tallying machines which sought to keep the polls open beyond 7 p.m., a bid that was immediately rejected by a judge.
It also sought to require the counting of provisional ballots of people who went to a different location that day but found they could not vote because they had been recorded as checking in and voting at the first site. But that lawsuit, filed on behalf of Lake as well as GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, was ended after the attorneys voluntarily dismissed it.
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