SIMPLY PUT: Kari Lake lost because she’s a loser
Kari Lake still says she won her gubernatorial election in Arizona, and that her former opponent, Governor Katie Hobbs, was installed through cheating.
Benny White, a Data Analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and an “audit guy,” disagrees.
Along with a small team of analysts, White has been following up on election ‘audits’ in his state, starting with the Cyber Ninjas and their drawn-out election investigation after Donald Trump lost the state in 2020.
Now, they’re looking into Lake’s loss, and their conclusion, in short, is that she lost because her own party didn’t vote for her.
Lake claims that she lost because her voters were disenfranchised, with more heavily Republican areas suffering machine and ballot issues.
White, by contrast, says her voters weren’t disenfranchised, but disaffected.
He defines a disaffected voter as one who cast half or more of their votes for one party (in Maricopa County elections in this case, that means 8 out of 15 races for Republicans; 7 out of 14 for Democrats) but does not cast their vote for the party nominee in a particular race.
So, for example, someone who cast votes for the Republicans running for Senate, House of Representatives, and half a dozen more offices, but rejecting Lake for Governor, would be a disaffected Republican voter in terms of the Governor’s race.
He’s released his findings in a series of charts, a word document describing the data analysis, and even maps showing the disaffected voter population, but ultimately, his conclusion is that a lot of Republicans chose not to support Lake.
“Republican supported disaffected voters cast 33,794 votes for Katie Hobbs. There was a total of 40,690 of these disaffected voters in the first place and 83.1% of them decided to vote for the opposing party’s candidate,” White says.
He also says that Hobbs had some disaffected voters too — a smaller number, though, with fewer than 9k casting their vote for Lake.
Lake lost the race by fewer than 20k votes — and specifically lost Maricopa County by almost 40k, according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s final canvass report.
It’s not White’s first election audit rodeo, either.
When he challenged shoddy work by the Cyber Ninjas in 2021, the Arizona Daily Star quoted his comparison of that “audit” to the one he’d participated in in 2016:
“We required 100% accuracy in that recount,” White recalled. “We would be counting a batch of 3,000 ballots using 10 people, and we were doing just one race. There were times it would take eight hours for those people to get that number right,” he said.
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
