Washington Post writer Phillip Bump ran the numbers to help explain the fuzzy math that Arizona Republicans are trying to use to justify their claim that the 2022 election was fraudulent, and that's the reason they lost.
A number of far-right Republicans, not just Kari Lake, but failed Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, and other GOP allies are claiming that the numbers simply don't add up for why Republican election deniers flopped so significantly. The reality is that the math adds up, just not in their favor.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, Finchem claimed that losing by 5 points meant it was the result of voter fraud. He doesn't have any evidence to present, but the lawsuit is filled with "technical complaints and innuendo," Bump explained.
According to Finchem, voter suppression was a huge problem, the reality is that there were difficulties casting ballots across the board and it didn't impact people directly from a partisan perspective. He also complains that because Katie Hobbs was the Secretary of State and on the ballot that it was somehow unfair. Since it is an elected position in the state, there aren't a lot of options for the post.
Bump noted that a major problem is that Finchem simply had a crap campaign with a single staffer to manage a race in a state with 7.3 million people.
"What this shows, more than anything, is that Republican voters were more skeptical of Finchem than of other candidates, like the losing Republican attorney general candidate (who filed his own suit against the election)," wrote Bump.
What he sees as sketchy is that there was a "Real vote" vs. what his vote was. He added the numbers from 1.3 million people in U.S. House races who voted for Republicans and 1 million who voted for Democrats. Finchem got 50,000 fewer votes than the Republican running for attorney general who didn't embrace election denialism as the key tenant of their campaign.
In the congressional races that Finchem looked at the two Republican incumbents were running unopposed. If you remove those from the equation, Democrats got about 70,000 more votes.
In the Democratic congressional races, you could remove Rep. Ruben Gallego’s (D) win over his opponent by 55 points and then see that both parties ran about even. Gallego's opponent also is suing for his 76,000-vote loss.