Abraham Hamadeh, the Trump endorsed candidate for attorney general of Arizona appears to have prematurely celebrated victory on Wednesday while the count was still ongoing and he’s trailing his Democratic opponent.
“I want to thank the people of Arizona for entrusting me with this great responsibility. I will NEVER forget who I’m fighting for,” Hamadeh wrote in a tweet.
However, the race is still too close to call. With 82% of the vote in, Hamadeh trails his Democratic opponent Kris Mayes by a margin of 0.82% which translates to about 16,500 votes, according to the New York Times. More than 560,000 votes are still to be counted.
Hamadeh, a former Army Reserve intelligence officer, is a political newcomer who just became an attorney in 2017. He won the GOP primary for attorney general in August after he was endorsed by Donald Trump for pushing the former president’s baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen.
After his tweet prematurely claiming victory, Hamadeh lashed out at election officials in Arizona.
“Arizona DESERVES results on Election Day. This is an embarrassment. Maricopa County needs accountability,” he wrote in a tweet.
Bill Gates, the top election official in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, said on Thursday that officials will start processing the roughly 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on election day on Friday.
“If you drop off an early ballot, it means it has to come in on Wednesday and start the process of being signature verified. We have experts here who go through, compare the signature on the outside of the ballot envelope with the signature that we have in our voter registration file, so that takes a while, cause we gotta get that right,” Gates told CNN.
Other statewide races for U.S senator and governor are yet to be called though Democrats have a slim lead in both.
