Arizona elections officials are "slow rolling the results" to "delay the inevitable" outcome of the race, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake told Newsmax on Thursday.
Lake told Bianca de la Garza on "John Bachman Now," she is "100% sure" she won her too-close-to-call race against Democrat challenger Katie Hobbs, vowing as governor, changes will come to the state's elections processes.
"There are 621,000, almost 622,000 votes left to be counted," Lake told de la Garza. "A good chunk of those, more than half, 384,000, are mail-in ballots that people carried to the polling place on Election Day to hand deliver.
"Those are people who don't trust the drop boxes and don't necessarily trust the postal service, and those will fall our way heavily. We estimate at the low end, those will fall 60% our way. At the high end, perhaps even over 80%."
Lake also insisted Hobbs, Arizona's secretary of state, "has never been in the lead."
"They just haven't counted the votes, and many of the votes are Election Day votes, which is where our people turn out," she said. "We are going to win. We're going to win handily."
Further, Lake said there are 17,000 so-called "drawer three" ballots, meaning they came from 70 voting centers "that had shoddy machines that weren't working."
But overall, Lake called Arizona's elections systems, which also had trouble in the 2020 election, "an embarrassment."
"The people of Arizona are sick and tired of elections being run like we're in some banana republic, and we won't have it anymore," Lake said. "We're going to win this. Everybody in this state knows we're going to win it. I was running against a basement candidate who didn't even campaign, didn't debate, and the people didn't vote for her. There was zero excitement."
The situation is "ridiculous," Lake lamented.
"We will, mark my words starting on day one, begin to reform our elections so that they're fair, honest, and transparent," Lake said.
Meanwhile, Lake said she has "very little faith" in the people who operate the elections in Maricopa County, the state's most populous location.
"I'm going to be real honest, as I'm always going to be honest, I think they're incompetent," she said. "But we will get through this. We have a lot of attorneys. We have poll watchers. We have people helping with the adjudication. We want to make sure this is done as fair as possible."
And, after that, "we will work with state lawmakers to reform our elections," Lake vowed.
"This is outrageous," she said. "People shouldn't have to wait this long for election results. It's a terrible system. It's not working, and we need to work to make it better."
Meanwhile, she said the elections officials in Arizona choose to "slow-roll results" by trickling out early ballot results first "because they know that's going to skew Democrat."
"Of course, we have ballots floating around everywhere in Arizona, and they start to set the narrative [that] Oh, the Democrats are winning," Lake said. "Then they slow the account and they stop counting, and they let it linger out there that it looks like the Democrats are winning – when they aren't. They haven't counted the vote."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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