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    Recount Confirms Democrat’s Victory in Arizona’s Attorney General Race

    Kris Mayes defeated Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican election denier, by 280 votes out of 2.5 million ballots cast, a court announced.Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Arizona, prevailed on Thursday in a recount by a razor-thin margin over Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican, bringing clarity to one of the last undecided races of the midterms.The margin of victory for Ms. Mayes was 280 votes out of about 2.5 million ballots cast in the November election, said Judge Timothy J. Thomason of the Maricopa County Superior Court, who announced the recount’s results in a brief judicial hearing. The recount reduced the margin between the two candidates by about half, with the Election Day results showing Mr. Hamadeh trailing Ms. Mayes by 511 votes.Mr. Hamadeh, whose legal effort to have himself declared the winner was dismissed by a judge on Friday, continued to sow doubt in the election results, saying in a post on Twitter that “we must get to the bottom of this election” and calling for ballots to be inspected.But during closing arguments in last week’s trial, Mr. Hamadeh’s lawyer, Timothy La Sota, acknowledged that he did not have any evidence of intentional misconduct or any vote discrepancies that would make up the gap between the candidates.On Thursday, Ms. Mayes shared a photo of her certificate of election on Twitter and issued a statement about the recount results, saying that “democracy is truly a team sport” and that she was ready to get to work as attorney general.The recount was conducted by county election officials, who reported their results to the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. She won the governor’s race last month against the Kari Lake, a Republican election denier who continues to dispute her defeat.The outcome of the attorney general’s contest dealt another blow to Republicans in a state where the party entered the midterms with heightened expectations of creating a red wave by seizing on high inflation and the flagging job approval numbers of President Biden.That perceived advantage turned out to be a mirage, with Democrats winning most of the marquee statewide offices.Election deniers pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims. Mr. Hamadeh and Ms. Lake contended that the election had been compromised.But election officials in Maricopa County, which is led by Republicans, have defended the voting process and said that there was no evidence that voters were turned away from casting ballots.Alexandra Berzon More

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    Kari Lake Will Present Election Fraud Claims in an Arizona County Court

    After a judge dismissed most of her claims, two will go forward. Lawyers expect she will have to clear a high bar, and her case relies on a collection of election deniers.Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona who made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign, is starting a two-day trial on Wednesday as she presses to have her loss overturned.Ms. Lake lost by around 17,000 votes to Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, but sued Maricopa County and Ms. Hobbs to overturn the results under Arizona’s election contest statutes. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge is allowing two of her claims of misconduct by election officials to go forward, but eight other claims were dismissed. A ruling is likely soon afterward.In a separate election case in Mohave County, the Republican candidate for attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, will present evidence on Friday. The November election ended with Mr. Hamadeh trailing Kris Mayes, the Democratic nominee, by 511 votes, within the margin that requires a mandatory statewide recount that is going on now.Lawyers for Ms. Hobbs and Maricopa County have been warning that such trials could become a free-for-all for election conspiracy theorists. Ms. Lake has indicated that she may call as witnesses people who have been pushing false or misleading claims related to Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election.There is, however, a high bar to proving election misconduct that could have swayed the results.“The court has given an opportunity to put them to the test,” said Abha Khanna, a lawyer for Ms. Hobbs. “If you think you have proof something happened and that proof doesn’t exist, and they’re not able to prove it in this court, I hope we could put to bed the idea that there’s something lurking out there.”The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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    Where Are Midterm Recounts Happening?

    Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesIn Arizona’s attorney general race, the Republican candidate, Abraham Hamadeh, trails his Democratic opponent, Kris Mayes, by 511 votes, a small enough margin that a recount must happen under state law. The recount in that race, and a few other Arizona contests, is likely to be completed by the end of December. More

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    Arizona Certifies Midterm Election Results After GOP Resistance

    The state’s top officials certified the results after weeks in which several Republican candidates have sowed baseless doubts about the outcome.Arizona’s top officials signed papers to certify the results of the state’s midterm election on Monday, completing a normally routine task that had become troubled in a state where Republican activists and candidates have claimed without evidence that the election results were irredeemably marred by widespread problems.Two heavily Republican counties in Arizona initially delayed certifying their results but ultimately did so. In one case, in Cochise County, certification came only under order from a judge.Finally, at an event on Monday that was closed to the public but broadcast live, the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who won this year’s race for governor, signed documents to certify the results in all 15 counties.Also signing the certifications were Gov. Doug Ducey and Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, both Republicans, along with Robert Brutinel, the chief justice of the State Supreme Court.In a speech before the signing of the documents, Ms. Hobbs addressed some of the conspiracy theories that had been spreading and said that the election had been properly conducted.“Powerful voices spread misinformation that threatened to disenfranchise voters,” she said. “Democracy prevailed, but it’s not out of the woods.”Mr. Ducey, the departing governor, explained that state law required the certification as part of the democratic process.“I swore an oath to uphold the law,” he said.Ms. Hobbs’s opponent for governor, Kari Lake, who lost by more than 17,000 votes, ran a campaign heavily focused on false conspiratorial claims of stolen elections. She and her allies have vowed to continue fighting the outcome, sowing doubts about the results with public statements and social media posts.The efforts have made Arizona the center of the national election-denial movement, attracting activists who have gained influence spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election as they speak at protests and local government hearings.Ms. Lake and the Republican nominee for attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, have suggested that after the certification, they may file lawsuits challenging the election results. Mr. Hamadeh is trailing Kris Mayes, a Democrat, by about 500 votes in a race that has not yet been called and is headed to a recount.Mr. Hamadeh previously filed a lawsuit asking a judge to declare him the winner, which was dismissed by the court as “premature” since under state law, a lawsuit challenging election results needs to be filed after the certification of an election, not before it. (Such a challenge must be filed within five days of certification.)The Republican candidates and their allies, including right-wing activists and media figures like Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald J. Trump, have claimed for weeks without evidence that voters in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county, were “disenfranchised.”They have pointed to technical problems on Election Day that led to long lines at some polling places. But in fact there has been no sign of widespread voter disenfranchisement, because voters who encountered problems were able to cast ballots via backup systems or at other polling locations.A New York Times review of dozens of accounts from voters, poll workers and observers that were posted by Ms. Lake and her allies found that many voters acknowledged that, while inconvenienced, they had ultimately been able to cast their ballots. More

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    G.O.P. Candidate in Arizona’s Attorney General Race Sues Over Election Results

    The candidate, Abe Hamadeh, alleged that local and state officials had mismanaged the Nov. 8 election.Abe Hamadeh, the Arizona Republican locked in a tight race to become the state’s next attorney general, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday contesting the preliminary results of an election that had already been headed to an automatic recount.The state’s final tally from the Nov. 8 election, which was set to be certified by counties by next week, has Mr. Hamadeh just 510 votes behind the Democratic candidate, Kris Mayes — 1,254,102 for Mr. Hamadeh and 1,254,612 for Ms. Mayes. That difference was within the margin needed to force an automatic recount under state law.Mr. Hamadeh’s lawsuit, filed in State Superior Court in Maricopa County, names as defendants Arizona’s secretary of state — Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who won the governor’s race — as well as the county recorders and boards of supervisors in the state’s 15 counties. The Republican National Committee joined Mr. Hamadeh in the suit as a plaintiff.Mr. Hamadeh and the R.N.C., in their complaint, ask the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the secretary of state from certifying Ms. Mayes as the winner and an order declaring Mr. Hamadeh the winner. The suit argues that equipment failures and errors in the management of polling places and in ballot tabulation led to an incorrect final vote count. It says there was no “fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,” but it claims there were mistakes that affected the final tally, given the contest’s narrow margin.The suit asks the court to allow additional votes to be counted, including 146 provisional ballots and 273 mail-in ballots that were segregated because the election system showed they came from voters who had already cast in-person ballots. It does not seek a rerun of the election, though it does claim that Mr. Hamadeh should be declared the winner. By state law, Arizona’s secretary of state is required to certify the results of the election by Dec. 5.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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    How Arizona Became an Abyss of Election Conspiracy Theories

    Of the roughly three dozen states that have held primary elections this year, Arizona is where Donald Trump’s conspiratorial fantasies about the 2020 election seem to have gained the most purchase.This week, Arizona Republicans nominated candidates up and down the ballot who focused their campaigns on stoking baseless conspiracy theories about 2020, when Democrats won the state’s presidential election for only the second time since the 1940s.Joe Biden defeated Trump in Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes — a whisker-thin margin that has spawned unending efforts to scrutinize and overturn the results, despite election officials’ repeated and emphatic insistence that very little fraud was committed.The most prominent winner in Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor was Kari Lake, a telegenic former news anchor who became a Trump acolyte. There’s also the G.O.P. pick for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, a cowboy-hat-wearing state lawmaker who marched at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.They are joined by Blake Masters, a hard-edged venture capitalist who is running to oust Senator Mark Kelly, the soft-spoken former astronaut who entered politics after his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords, was seriously wounded by a gunman in 2011.There’s also Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general, along with several candidates for the State Legislature who are all but certain to win their races. It’s pretty much election deniers all the way down.Another notable primary result this week: Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona House, who offered emotional congressional testimony in June about the pressure he faced to overturn the election, was easily defeated in his bid for a State Senate seat.To make sense of it all, I spoke with Jennifer Medina, a California-based politics reporter for The New York Times who covers Arizona and has deep expertise on many of the policy issues that drive elections in the state. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.You’ve been reporting on Arizona for years. Why are many democracy watchers so alarmed about the primary election results there?It’s pretty simple: If these candidates win in November, they have promised to do things like ban the use of electronic voting machines and get rid of the state’s hugely popular and long-established vote-by-mail system.It’s also easy to imagine a similar scenario to the 2020 presidential election but with vastly different results. Both Lake and Finchem have repeatedly said they would not have certified Biden’s victory.Some might say this is all just partisan politics or posturing — that Finchem, Lake and Masters just said what they think they needed to say to win the primary. What does your reporting show? Is their election denial merely loose talk, or are there indications that they truly believe what they are saying?There’s no reason to think these candidates won’t at the very least try to put in place the kinds of plans they have promoted.Undoubtedly, they would face legal challenges from Democrats and from nonpartisan watchdog groups.But it’s worth remembering that despite losing battle after battle in the courts over the last two years, these Republicans are still pushing the same election-denial theories. And they’ve stoked those false beliefs among huge numbers of voters, who helped power their victories on Tuesday.A polling location in Tucson, Ariz., on Tuesday.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesWe saw evidence of that this week with the surge of Republicans going to the polls in person on Election Day instead of voting by mail, as they had for years, after repeatedly hearing baseless claims that mailed-in ballots are rife with fraud. This was especially true of Lake backers.There’s no way to know what these candidates truly believe in their hearts, but they have left no room for doubting their intentions.What’s your sense of whether these Republicans are capable of pivoting to the center for the general election? And what might happen if they did?We haven’t seen much, if any, evidence that these candidates have plans to pivot to the center, aside from minor tweaks to some of the language in Masters’s TV ads.They have spent months denouncing people in the party they see as RINOs (“Republicans in name only,” in case you’ve forgotten). In Arizona, that list has included Gov. Doug Ducey, who refused to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, as Trump demanded, and the now-deceased Senator John McCain, who angered many conservatives and Trump supporters by voting against repealing the Affordable Care Act.So even if these candidates do try to tack toward the center, expect their Democratic opponents to point to those statements and other past comments to portray them as extremists on the right.I do wonder how much the Republicans will continue to focus on the 2020 election in the final stretch of this year’s campaign. More moderate Republican officials and strategists I’ve spoken to in Arizona have repeatedly said they worry that doing so will weaken the party’s chances in the state, where independent voters make up roughly a third of the electorate.Do Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state who won the Democratic nomination for governor, and Senator Mark Kelly, the Democrat who is up for re-election in the fall, talk much about election denial or Jan. 6 when they’re out with voters?Hobbs rose to widespread prominence in the days after the 2020 election when she appeared on national television at all hours of the day and night assuring voters that all ballots would be counted fairly and accurately, no matter how long that took. So it’s not an exaggeration to say that her own fate is deeply tied to the rise of election denial.But even as her closest supporters have promoted Hobbs as a guardian of democracy — and she has benefited from that in her fund-raising — it is not a central piece of her day-to-day campaigning. Many Democratic strategists in the state say they believe she would be better off by focusing on issues like the economy, health care and abortion.And that line of thinking is even more true in the Kelly camp, where many believe the incumbent senator is best served by focusing on his image as an independent who is willing to buck other members of his party.In March, for instance, Kelly referred to the rise in asylum seekers crossing the border as a “crisis,” language Biden has resisted. Kelly has also supported some portion of a border wall, a position that most Democrats adamantly oppose.As a political issue, how does election denial play with voters versus, say, jobs or the price of gas and groceries?We don’t know the answer yet, but whether voters view candidates who deny the 2020 election as disqualifying is one of the most important and interesting questions this fall.I’ve spoken to dozens of people in Arizona in the last several months — Democrats, Republicans and independents — and few are single-issue voters. They are all worried about things like jobs and gas prices and inflation and abortion, but they are also very concerned about democracy and what many Republicans refer to as “election integrity.” But their understanding of what those terms mean is very different depending on their political outlook.Is there any aspect of these candidates’ appeal that people outside Arizona might be missing?Each of the winning Republican candidates we’ve discussed has also focused on cracking down on immigration and militarizing the border, which could prove popular in Arizona. It’s a border state with a long history of anti-immigration policies.Two demographic groups are widely credited with helping tilt the state toward Democrats in the last two elections: white women in the suburbs and young Latinos. As the state has trended more purple, the Republican Party is moving further to the right. Now, whether those voters show up in force for the party this year will help determine the future of many elections to come.What to read this weekend about democracyPro-Trump operatives are flooding local officials with public records requests to seek evidence for the former president’s false stolen-election claims and to gather information on voting machines and voters, Reuters reports.Black, Hispanic and young voters are the most afraid about facing violence at the polls, according to a new poll from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.The New Republic takes a critical look at independent state legislature theory, which is now headed to the Supreme Court.The Atlantic looks at the congressional effort to overhaul the Electoral Count Act and asks a simple question: How do you actually stop the steal?postcard FROM DALLASThe lobby of the Hilton Anatole hotel, which hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference began on Thursday.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesSeven hours at CPACIs there such a thing as a heat index in Texas? Outside the Hilton Anatole hotel in Dallas, it felt like 105 degrees on Thursday.But inside the cavernous hotel, the air conditioning was cranked up full blast as Mike Lindell, the election-denying pillow mogul who has branched out into coffee and slippers, was moving through the media row at a gathering at the Conservative Political Action Conference. A swarm of Republicans approached, angling for selfies and handshakes while they voiced their approval of his efforts and spending to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Beyond the conservative media booths, each resembling a Fox News set, I wandered through an emporium of “Trump won” and “Make America Pro-Life Again” merchandise. My N95 mask made me conspicuous, but each person I asked for an interview obliged.There was Jeffrey Lord, who was fired by CNN in 2017 for evoking — mockingly, he said at the time — a Nazi slogan in a convoluted Twitter exchange. He told me that he had just attended a private gathering with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister revered by many American conservatives. Orban is misunderstood, Lord told me, noting that Ronald Reagan was once accused of being a warmonger. I asked whether conservatives like Lord would put Orban in a similar category as Reagan.“In terms of freedom, and all of that, I do,” he said. “It’s a theme with President Trump.”In the media area inside the hotel’s main ballroom, right-wing news outlets had medallion status. A prime seat in the front row was reserved for One America News, the pro-Trump network. Two seats to my right, a woman with a media credential was eating pork rinds from a Ziploc bag.Seven hours later, I emerged from the hotel, doffing my N95, which left an imprint on my face. It was only 99 degrees.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you next week.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More