Recount confirms Democrat Kris Mayes won Arizona attorney general race
CNN –
Democrat Kris Mayes won the Arizona attorney general race, an automatic recount confirms. The Arizona Supreme Court in Maricopa County announced the results of the recount on Thursday.
Mayes defeated Republican Abraham Hamadeh by a margin of 280 votes. In Arizona, an automatic recount begins when the difference between the two statewide candidates who received the largest shares of the vote is equal to or less than 0.5%.
CNN did not predict a winner in the race before the recount.
The recount resulted in a margin that nearly halved, with Mayes’ lead going from 511 votes in the initial results to 280 votes after the recount. Overall, Mayes won 196 votes, while Hamadeh won 427. The two were vying to succeed Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who finished a distant third in this year’s Republican primary to face Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.
The biggest vote swings so far came from Pinal County, where Hamadeh won 392 votes and Mayes won 115 votes. In almost every other county, vote changes were in the single digits.
In a statement, Pinal County said the discrepancies were the product of “human error,” with the differences mostly stemming from Election Day votes that were inadvertently miscounted, according to a report from the county. Election workers, according to a possible error detailed in the report, may have misinterpreted error messages from a tabulating machine, leading them to think some ballots had been counted when they had not.
The attorney general’s race remained the last hope for a statewide victory for a candidate endorsed by former President Donald Trump, as Democrats prevailed over Trump-backed GOP candidates who were denied votes in the highest-profile gubernatorial races. US Senate and Secretary of State.
But with Hamadeh’s loss, Republicans have failed in the top three statewide executive races on this year’s ballot. Democrat Katie Hobbs won the governorship over Republican Kari Lake, while Democrat Adrian Fontes will succeed Hobbs as secretary of state after defeating GOP candidate Mark Finchem. One statewide Republican official who won re-election, state Treasurer Kimberly Yee, avoided intra-party battles and was never endorsed by Trump.
Lake and Finchem unsuccessfully sued to overturn their election results. Hamadeh filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court in Mohave County challenging the results of the 2022 election based on what the lawsuit described as errors in election management and vote counting. Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen ruled against Hamadeh last week.
Hamadeh, a former Army intelligence officer who worked in the Maricopa County District Attorney’s office, parroted Trump’s 2020 campaign lies and said he would increase the size of the DA’s office’s election integrity unit. general.
“It’s time to lock some people up and handcuff them,” he said at a Trump rally in October.
Mayes, his opponent, served seven years as a Republican member of the Arizona Public Utilities Commission, winning statewide elections in 2004 and 2006. She left the GOP in 2019 and has vowed to “depoliticize” the attorney general’s office. However, Mayes has also said she will not enforce abortion restrictions in the state.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
