Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Arizona, declined to concede and accept the election results in the governor's race on Thursday, a move that came months after she refused to say on the campaign trail if she would accept a losing outcome.
The Trump-backed candidate trails Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs by 17,200 votes. She said in a video statement released Thursday that she is currently “collecting evidence and data” about the electoral process and has recruited “the best and brightest legal team to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week.”
Lake pointed to printer issues in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa. Of the county’s 223 voting centers, 70 had printer issues on election day. However, voters were given the choice to wait in line until the issue was resolved, vote at a different election center, or have their ballot stored in a box that was sent to the county’s central facility to be counted.
After Hobbs was declared the winner of the election, Lake tweeted that “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”
The Lake campaign petitioned a judge on Election Day to extend the vote, but the judge rejected the motion, noting he did not see any evidence voters had been disenfranchised.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Democrat, and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman, a Republican, issued a joint statement saying all ballots had been successfully counted.
“The good news is election administration has built-in redundancies — backup plans when things don’t go as planned. This enables all valid votes to count even if technology, on occasion, fails. Voters impacted by the printer issue had several ways to cast their ballot yesterday,” the statement read.
Lake also attacked Hobbs for refusing to recuse herself from her role in certifying the election results as secretary of state. Her office is in charge of signing paperwork along with the current Republican governor and attorney general. Hobb’s deputy Allie Bones told CNN on Monday that her office will not touch any ballots from the election.