CNN
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Democrat Chris Mays wins the Arizona Attorney General election, confirming an automatic recount. The Superior Court of Maricopa County, Arizona, announced the results of the recount on Thursday.
Mays defeated Republican Abraham Hamadeh by 280 votes. In Arizona, automatic recounts are triggered when the margin between her two candidates with the most votes statewide falls below her 0.5%.
CNN did not predict the winner of the race before the recount.
As a result of the recount, the margin narrowed by almost half, and Mays’ lead went from 511 votes in the first result to 280 votes after the recount. Overall, Mays received her 196 votes and Hamade received her 427 votes. The two are running to succeed Attorney General Mark Brnovic, who finished third in this year’s Republican primary, ahead of Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.
In Pinal District, Hamade received 392 votes and Maize 115. Nearly every other county had single-digit vote changes.
In a statement, Pinal County said the difference was the product of “human error” and that, according to reports from the county, the difference was largely due to election day votes that were inadvertently not counted. According to one of the mistakes detailed in , an election official may have misinterpreted an error message from a counting machine to think that a ballot that was not actually counted was counted.
The election for Attorney General is backed by former President Donald Trump after Democrats won a high-profile race for Governor, U.S. Senate and Secretary of State over a Republican candidate who has refused to run a Trump-backed election. For the candidate, it remained the last hope of a statewide victory.
But Hamade’s loss prevented Republicans from advancing to the top three statewide presidential races in this year’s ballot. Democrat Katie Hobbs wins Republican Governor Kari Lake, and Democrat Adrian Fontes defeats Republican nominee Mark Finchem to replace Hobbs as secretary of state. Treasurer Kimberly Yee, one of the statewide Republican legislators who won reelection, eschewed party squabbles and never won Trump’s support.
Lake and Finchem unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit to overturn the election results. Hamade filed a lawsuit in Mojave County State Superior Court to challenge the results of the 2022 election, filing a lawsuit based on errors in election administration and ballot counting. Mojave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jansen ruled against Hamade last week.
Hamade, a former Army intelligence officer who worked for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, parroted Trump’s 2020 election lie during the campaign and said he would expand the size of the attorney general’s office’s election security division. .
“It’s time to lock some people up and handcuff them,” he said at a Trump rally in October.
His opponent, Mays, served seven years as a Republican on the Arizona Public Utility Commission, winning statewide elections in 2004 and 2006. She left the Republican Party in her 2019, vowing to “depoliticize” her attorney general’s office. But Mays also said she doesn’t intend to enforce abortion restrictions within the state.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
