By Caitlin Sievers | AZ Mirror
U.S. Congressman Ruben Gallego’s lead over his opponent Kari Lake in the contest for one of Arizona’s U.S. Senate seats shrunk Thursday, as more results slowly trickled in.
After Maricopa County, where 60% of the state’s voters live, released more results at around 7 p.m. Gallego, a Democrat, led Republican Lake by only 1.7 percentage points and 43,698 votes, down from 2.5 percentage points and 52,578 after votes were tallied Wednesday.
Lake’s campaign team shared hopeful messages on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, urging supporters to cure any issues with their ballots so that their votes count and celebrating returns that leaned Republican.
Maricopa County posted results from 72,100 additional ballots Thursday evening, pushing its total number already tabulated to more than 1.6 million. Those votes favored Lake at 57% to Gallego’s 41%. The county estimates that it has around 472,000 more ballots to count, and there are around 780,000 left to count across the state.
Even though Maricopa County’s counting process has taken an average of 13 days over the past 16 years, some of Lake’s fans baselessly speculated on X that the counting process was taking so long because Democrats were attempting to rig the election in Gallego’s favor.
Even though Lake lagged in polling throughout the Senate race, some of her fans could not believe that presumed president-elect Donald Trump had raked in over 128,000 more votes in Arizona than she did.
