The Arizona GOP and the wider national Republican Party are in a panic today as votes keep coming in from Tuesday’s election in the form of absentee or mail-in ballots, and the counting is taking place largely in Maricopa County, where the state’s largest urban center, Phoenix, is located, as well as Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s home district.
Although the unofficial results on Tuesday were indicating that Republican Martha McSally had won the seat in the US Senate, Sinema has now taken a narrow lead which appears to only be growing as the day moves on.
In fact, the Arizona GOP filed a lawsuit this week to attempt to legally force the state to stop calling voters to verify that they had voted by mail when any signature was unclear, the way the current law requires. Arizona Republicans complained that the state was only supposed to call voters before the election was held.
That raised the ire of possibly the state’s most famous Republican, the widow of Senator John McCain, Cindy, who furiously tagged the State Party in a tweet calling them out for obstructing the democratic process:
@AZGOP I am one of those mail in ballots. I was under the impression my vote was always counted.
— Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) November 8, 2018
One imagines the stern look on her face as she thumbed the message on her phone.
As the wife of “maverick” Senator McCain, it’s a shame that she has to be the one to call out Republicans for attempting to cheat in this election just because they don’t like the results as they come in — although perhaps hearing it from one of their own will shame the Arizona GOP Chair Jonathan Lines, who was quoted on Thursday as saying “It is not fair” that absentee ballots should get special treatment, despite the fact that this process has been carried out before, benefited Republicans, and never once been the subject of a complaint.
Curious, isn’t it?
Featured image via screen capture
