Kari Lake Is the New Stacey Abrams

Ms. Lake received 77,342 fewer votes than GOP state Treasurer

Kimberly Yee.

Ms. Lake received 39,165 fewer votes than the combined GOP U.S. House candidates.

Ms. Lake received 23,901 fewer votes than GOP county prosecutor

Rachel Mitchell.

These figures are especially striking because voter interest wanes down the ballot. Compared with the Governor’s race, 78,000 fewer people voted for local prosecutor. Yet Ms. Mitchell still won more raw ballots than Ms. Lake.

If granular numbers tell the story better, the Arizona Republic points to a Maricopa precinct called Bayshore, where it says Republicans have an 11-point registration advantage. The state’s three Trumpiest politicians all lost the precinct. Ms. Lake garnered 2,003 votes. Senate aspirant

Blake Masters

took 1,911. Secretary of State nominee

Mark Finchem

had 1,877.

Ms. Yee won Bayshore with 2,229 votes, 11% more than Ms. Lake. Ms. Mitchell earned 2,080. A GOP state Senator had 2,120. The takeaway? Ms. Lake would have won if she hadn’t alienated mainstream Republicans. But she called

John McCain

a “loser” and echoed President Trump’s debunked 2020 fraud claims. Some GOP voters don’t want a Governor who will say almost anything for a pat on the head from Mr. Trump.

The screw-up in Maricopa was that many ballot printers were producing ink too light to be scanned by on-site tabulators, though it was “easily readable by the human eye,” the county says. A Washington Post analysis found that precincts with printer issues were 37% Republican, close to the 35% for the county overall. Some affected areas were heavily Democratic.

The county says the longest reported wait time at 85% of its 223 vote centers was under 45 minutes, and half were under 15 minutes. But at seven locations it was 80 to 115 minutes. This is not acceptable.

Maricopa should promise it won’t happen again and acknowledge that some potential voters could have been discouraged. On the other hand, the county’s model is flexible: Residents aren’t locked into a polling place and can cast a ballot at any voting site. Many people surely routed around bottlenecks.

As a fail-safe, ballots that won’t scan can go into a secure slot on the tabulator box, marked with a number 3, to be tallied later. Yet conspiratorial Republicans urged voters to refuse. “DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN ‘BOX 3,’” tweeted Arizona GOP Chair

Kelli Ward.

In the end, 16,724 ballots went into those slots. The county says all were tabulated. Another 206 voters checked in at one site and cast a ballot at another.

Ms. Lake’s argument is that fed-up voters left the line or even stayed home. Perhaps some did, Democrats included: After all, Governor-elect

Katie Hobbs

won Maricopa, 51.1% to 48.6%. But how can Ms. Lake blame no-shows for her loss, when other GOP candidates in Maricopa outran her by tens of thousands of votes?

Arizona is waiting on Cochise County to certify its results, and then Ms. Lake is promising to challenge the election in court. We’ll see how that turns out. One of her claims is that Ms. Hobbs, as the current Secretary of State, was “the woman in charge of running her own election.” Where have we heard that one before? Oh, right, Stacey Abrams in Georgia in 2018.