In the wake of voting machine problems that caused frustration and delays for in-person voters on Election Day in Maricopa County, Arizona, the Republican chairman of the county Board of Supervisors has been engaged in what can most charitably described as damage control.
Sunday morning, Chairman Bill Gates released a video on the county’s Twitter thread that claimed to “answer your election-related questions this weekend.”
Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake is apparently a fan of those answers — but probably not for the reason Gates would like.
Lake’s campaign team tweeted in response to Sunday morning’s video, implying that Gates was giving Lake’s legal team ammunition to challenge the current election results.
According to The Associated Press, Lake is currently losing by over 17,000 votes with only about 13,000 ballots remaining to be counted. The AP called the race in favor of Lake’s opponent, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, on Nov. 14, at which time 43,000 ballots remained to be counted.
“The AP concluded that, even though Republican Kari Lake had been posting increasingly larger margins in vote updates from Maricopa County, she was not gaining a big enough share to overtake Hobbs, and was running out of remaining votes,” they said.
Lake’s supporters had been calling foul days before that, arguing that Republican voters are more likely to vote on Election Day than Democrats, and that therefore Election Day problems have a disproportionate effect on Republicans.
Gates apparently either doesn’t understand that argument, doesn’t think it’s worth responding to, or believes it has merit and is therefore trying to change the subject.
“One of the questions we’ve been getting since the general election on Nov. 8 is, did the printer problems on Election Day impact Republican-leaning areas more than Democratic-leaning areas?” he said in the video after introducing myself.
Now, I’m not saying that no one has asked that question. But I will say that I haven’t in the two weeks since Election Day heard anyone ask that question or allege that geography had anything to do with the problem. As I said above, the question is about timing and the assumption that Republicans vote in greater numbers on the day itself rather than taking advantage of mail-in, early or absentee voting as Democrats are more likely to do.
“Well, as your supervisor, I want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to cast their vote,” Gates said — which, of course, did not answer the hypothetical question he had just posed for himself. But he got to it eventually.
“We reviewed this issue,” he said (without defining “we,” I should note), “and we found that the 70 vote centers that were impacted by the printer issues were spread all across Maricopa County, and they did not impact one part of the valley more than the other.”
He then concluded: “Thank you for your question on this issue, and look forward to more updates this weekend.”
Again, I have no reason to believe this was actually a question anyone asked, and Gates certainly didn’t provide any evidence that that had happened. The Maricopa County Twitter account, after publishing Gates’ promise for “more updates this weekend,” published exactly one late Sunday afternoon in response to calls — which, in this case, I’ve actually heard — for a new election in Arizona.
Here are both of those videos, for interested readers (with Lake’s response below).
We continue to answer your election-related questions this weekend. Here, Chairman @billgatesaz speaks about whether Election Day printer problems impacted certain areas more than others. pic.twitter.com/H8bRO682ER
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) November 20, 2022
Tabulation is nearly complete for the Nov. 2022 General Election. Chairman @billgatesaz explains what happens next. pic.twitter.com/mEwAj6DjxR
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) November 21, 2022
Preserve your documents, Bill. https://t.co/dNT6IdVvyX
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) November 20, 2022
Our lawyers are really loving these. Keep it up.
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) November 20, 2022
Lake’s team offered no explanation regarding why they believed the county’s tweets helped their cause, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to speak for them — or even claim any sort of proof that Gates is being less than fully honest with Arizona voters.
I will say this, however: If a salesman trying to sell me a car used the same body language and over-rehearsed tone of voice that Gates used in both of these videos, I wouldn’t walk out of his dealership.
I’d run.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
