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Officials from Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, released results from 98,618 ballots Sunday night that broke 54.6 percent in favor of Republican Kari Lake, bringing her closer to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
ABC 15 Data Analyst Garret Archer reported the batch breakdown to be 54.6 percent in favor of Lake and 45.4 percent in favor of Democrat Katie Hobbs, giving Lake a net gain of 8,911 votes. Maricopa County election officials noted in a press release that “nearly all” of the ballots in the batch “were dropped off on Election Day,” which have been widely expected to break for Republican candidates.
Lake trailed Hobbs by 26,011 votes statewide, with 93 percent of the total vote reported as of 9:00 p.m. Eastern, according to the New York Times:
- Hobbs: 1,211,595 – 50.5 percent
- Lake: 1,185,584 – 49.5 percent
Dave Wasserman, senior editor of the U.S. House of Representatives at the Cook Political Report, implied Lake needed a greater percentage of the vote soon after the results came in and asserted that it is “[e]extremely tough to see how [she] wins now.”