Arizona has perhaps the largest and most competitive series of races in the nation – including contests for Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general. In Maricopa County, which holds the vast majority of the state’s votes, Supervisor Bill Gates said results may not be known until Friday. That’s because hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots are expected to make it to ballots on Election Day. Those will require verification of voters’ signatures, a lengthy process that by law won’t begin until Wednesday. If many people fail to vote early, there will also be long queues, stressing polling stations and the teams responsible for counting. Gates, a former campaign lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party, led an election-eve news conference in Phoenix about “disinformation.” While he didn’t name names, Gates characterized the kind of messages that Hamadeh, Bobb and others have championed as the most problematic. That disinformation campaign, Gates said, “came into high gear” last week. At the same time, GOP activist groups and even candidates are instructing their constituents to vote in ways that could lead to long lines and delays in the process. Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for secretary of state and staunch election denier, is among those encouraging voters to turn out on Election Day. The guidance to GOP voters echoes what Trump did in 2020, when Democrats were expected to vote by mail in large numbers because of concerns about the pandemic. Trump built a campaign around delegitimizing mail-in ballots and even tried to block their counting, launching a barrage of frivolous legal challenges and even a draft executive order for the military to seize voting machines. In an interview with POLITICO, Gates said he fears a repeat after voting day. If Republicans win, “they can say ‘we got over the fraud,’” like gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake did during the primary, Gates said. “If you lose, then you can say, ‘Ah, look at all these terrible things that happened on Election Day.’ I think that’s probably it,” Gates said. “If you’re going to complain about how long it takes to count ballots, which they already do, and yet you’re working to make it harder to count ballots faster,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. , “makes you wonder if this is intentional.” The center is a non-profit organization that works with election officials. In a sign of how worried Democrats are about a series of GOP “choice-denials” sweeping the state’s top executive posts, it was at a Nov. 3 rally in that state that former President Barack Obama warned that the Democratic ” may not survive.” It appears that the push for last-minute voting is based on a conspiracy theory that Democrats can rig voting machines. State Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who has supported a party-line review of the 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, told One America News Network viewers last month that “we have to vote on the last day, on Election Day, to do it I don’t know how much to cheat.” Gates stressed that all voting machines must be tested before the election, and hand counts of “statistically significant lots” are conducted by bipartisan groups. Meanwhile, Finchem has suggested he will not accept the results of his race if he loses and will demand a hand count again. At the press conference, Gates was asked whether any of the GOP candidates for governor, Senate, secretary and attorney general over the past two years had accepted a standing invitation to tour the data center recording their concerns. “Not one of them,” Gates said. Calls for voting only on election day – while challenging longer counting times – are rampant. “Any state that doesn’t count all the votes and announce the winner on Tuesday night is incompetent,” Richard Grenell, a close Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany, tweeted last week. Maryland Matters reported that an aide to Michael Perutka, the Republican candidate for attorney general, encouraged voters to “form long lines” by arriving two hours before the polls closed on Election Day. “Vote on Nov. 8 as late as possible,” said campaign coordinator Macky Stafford. “If everyone could stand in long, long lines at 6 o’clock, that would really help us.” In Georgia, a recent online pamphlet from a grassroots group read: “Voting in person and on Election Day is the only way to beat the system,” the Associated Press reported. More recently, some GOP candidates have pushed back against those guidelines. “If you have a mail-in ballot, I think you should mail it in. I want people to vote,” Lake told reporters this month. “And vote any way you want, but vote.”
