The war of words between Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and state election officials continues, even if the ballot tabulations from election night seemingly remain stuck in neutral.
Bill Gates, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman, came out publicly Thursday against Lake's claims of election officials "slow rolling the results" of the races involving the governor's office, the U.S. Senate and secretary of state.
"Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are 'slow rolling' this, when they're working 14-18 hours [a day]," said Gates.
As Newsmax chronicled earlier Friday, election officials still have more than 570,000-plus ballots to count before determining the winners.
And according to The Arizona Republic, the officials plan on working through the weekend on counting votes — instead of suspending operations until Monday.
Arizona law reportedly allows officials a time window of Nov. 28 to finish counting votes.
The majority of states have either finished or have reached the 90th percentile of precincts counted.
On Thursday, Arizona election officials speculated they likely wouldn't be done counting ballots until "early next week."
"If [Lake's] team would have been paying attention before this election, they would have heard us talk about this over and over again — that we were not going to have results on election night or even the next day, that it was going to take several days," said Gates.
"Everybody needs to calm down a little bit, turn the rhetoric down," added the Maricopa County official.
On Friday, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., agreed with Lake's assessment of the election officials' conduct.
"This has not been the cleanest-run election in Arizona [history], for sure," Biggs told Newsmax, while appearing on "John Bachman Now" with host Kilmeny Duchardt. "I think [Lake] is right on the money."
Biggs also offered a prediction for the gubernatorial race: "I am confident that Kari Lake will be the next governor," he said.
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