What is going on in the governor's race in Arizona?  The media have called it for Katie Hobbs, after the Nov. 14 Monday night "drop," supposedly raising the total counted to 99% of the expected final total.  According to NBC News, the remaining uncounted vote total is estimated to be 25,494, far above the margin of 16,644 that we are told separates Hobbs from Kari Lake.  It's reasonable to assume that there are areas where Lake won with 75%, and these would be the uncounted areas, where it's possible that corrupt election officials might be holding back and delaying, or "curing," votes.  So calling the race does not make sense, if you were to suspend disbelief and assume that the vote-counting is honest.  But of course we know that those who call the races are politically biased.

It's interesting to compare the statewide uncounted votes with those in Maricopa County, which is expected to have 60% of the statewide total of votes, but the county has counted only 95% of the expected vote total.  In Maricopa, NBC News is saying that Hobbs is ahead by  37,501 votes, but the number of uncounted votes in the county is 80,911.  It's strange that there are more uncounted votes in Maricopa than in the whole state.  And just as in the statewide figures, these county figures would allow for a reasonable person to question where the remaining votes are.  Are they in the heavily Lake areas?  Pollster Richard Barris claimed last week, during the drip-drip-drip theater of daily "drops," that the uncounted areas were 70% or higher Lake areas.  Whatever happened to the returns from those Lake areas?

Where the heck are the remaining 5% of votes in Maricopa?  I'd like to know, since I understand that we still haven't gotten any big 70% Lake dumps as we were promised by Barris, and we still have 80,911 votes to count in the county.  Lake got a disappointing 51.8% of the Saturday-night (11/12) dump.  We were told to wait for the next one, but the next one, on Sunday night, gave Lake a slightly higher but disappointing 54.6%.  At that point, we had chewed up 93.3% of the total expected county vote.  Not much rope left.

The Monday-night drop was the plunging of the long knife.  That drop gave Lake a whopping 56.7% of the newly "counted" votes, but still a far cry from what was needed.  So NBC and other outlets called the race against Lake, and everyone went home.  Since Monday, the figures have hardly changed.  I guess there's no need to continue counting when all you need to do is run a headline saying the election-denier who spouts Trump lies lost.

I worry that the same people who count votes and call winners are keeping the books at my bank, testing my blood, inspecting my car, capping my teeth, billing me for municipal water and sewage, running the Federal Reserve, and calculating the balance due on my Chevy Malibu.  Paper ballots sound good, but election officials could easily produce fraudulent ballots.  Iowa-style caucuses may sound attractive, but in my experience in Iowa in the 2000 cycle, it was a corrupt horror show of migrant workers "caucusing" and officious campaign workers ramrodding through the system incorrect vote calculations.

Perhaps we could turn voting over to the state legislators.  That may generate more interest in statewide elections.  As we plumb the depths of election fraud, I would like to salute Kari Lake for not conceding a race that has not been completed.  She deserves our support.

Image: Kari Lake.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.