Twenty-four hours after polls closed in the GOP primary for Arizona governor, the race is too close to call, yet Fox News host Laura Ingraham and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich complained Wednesday that the lack of an outcome is “crazy,” “obscene,” “a disgrace,” and “profoundly wrong.”
Kari Lake, former President Donald Trump’s pick for the seat who alleged voter fraud about a week before election day, has a slight lead over Karrin Taylor Robson, former Vice President Mike Pence’s choice, with about 82 percent of votes counted. During her 10 p.m. broadcast, Ingraham said that a new batch of votes in Maricopa County had been reported, with Robson now leading there by less than 1 percentage point.
“The county says that it can release updated numbers tomorrow around 10 p.m. That’s great for us because our show starts at 10 p.m. Eastern,” the Fox host said. “But Newt, I talked about this with [Sean] Hannity. This is obscene that in the greatest country in the world, we can’t count our votes on Election Day and report on election night. What the heck is going on and why is this still not fixed?”
ADVERTISEMENT
Gingrich claimed the situation was “crazy,” suggesting that if the winner of the French presidential election (in which only in-person paper ballots were allowed) could be determined the night of the election, then Arizona’s results should be known promptly also. (That result, though, was a comfortable 17 percentage-point margin of victory for incumbent Emmanuel Macron.)
“There’s something profoundly wrong with the way that we approach all of this, and I think it will be interesting tomorrow to watch because there are other counties that Lake was carrying by a pretty good margin and I don’t think they are finishing reporting either,” Gingrich said. “So who knows what the final number is going to be sometime tomorrow. And you are right: It is crazy that they can’t just get this done.”
Notable races in Arizona that have been called include that of Rusty Bowers, the Republican House Speaker who testified before the Jan. 6 committee of Trump’s efforts to get him to overturn the 2020 election and was promptly censured by the state GOP. Bowers lost to a Trump-backed opponent.
Also on the losing end was Ron Watkins, the alleged founder of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who couldn’t manage to get more than 4 percent of the vote in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.
Winning his primary race for secretary of state, and therefore one step closer to overseeing the elections process, was Trump-endorsed Mark Finchem, who has supported the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.
After Arizonans cast their ballots in November 2020, it was the Fox News Decision Desk which first called the state for Biden on election night – a move that didn’t sit well with many Fox figures and, of course, Trump.
