Nov. 12, 2022 US election coverage

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez will be the first Latino Democrat elected to Congress from Washington state, CNN projects, winning election to the state’s 3rd Congressional District.

Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto repair shop owner whose father immigrated to the US from Mexico, will defeat Republican Joe Kent to succeed GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who finished behind Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent in the August top-two primary.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s defeat of Kent is a significant victory for Democrats in a race that had been rated Lean Republican by Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales.  

Democrats had long targeted this seat, but GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler had proven a strong incumbent. Her vote to impeachment Donald Trump after the US Capitol riot, however, made her a target of the former president. When she failed to advance to the general election in Washington’s top-two system, she became one of four Republicans who voted to impeached Trump who failed to make it to the general election — and the 3rd District became an open seat.

Kent, a former Green Beret and gold star spouse endorsed by Trump, had tried to shift his campaign rhetoric toward the center – including by removing calls to adjudicate the 2020 election from his website sometime between June and July. But as CNN KFile has reported, his campaign had been bogged down by associations with white nationalists and extremists, whom Kent has repeatedly had to distance himself from.

Pima County, Arizona, will post 19,944 newly counted votes on Saturday night by 8 p.m. ET, county officials said.

These officials added that the votes being released tonight are primarily mail ballots that were received or dropped off prior to Election Day. 

Pima County is a Democratic stronghold and is home to Tucson.

There are just under 50,000 votes left to be processed in the county and this remaining vote is primarily mail ballots that were dropped off on Election Day, according to the officials.

The county will not be posting any vote totals on Sunday and will not be holding a news conference, although they will continue to process ballots and tabulate results. After Saturday night's post, the next vote dump and news conference will be on Monday.  

The county has also completed verifying early ballots and will begin work on processing the remaining 2,400 provisional ballots.

The political world's attention is on the western US Saturday as officials work through another day to tally the votes in key races.

The razor-thin elections for Nevada’s Senate seat and Arizona’s governorship have yet to be called. Large counties in both states are working to whittle down the tens of thousands of ballots that still need to be counted.

Races we're watching

In Nevada: Republican Adam Laxalt is holding onto a slim lead of about 860 votes over Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats are projected to take control of the Senate. If she loses, the fate of the upper house will be decided in December's Georgia runoff.

In Arizona: Democrat Katie Hobbs leads Republican Kari Lake by about 31,000 votes in the governor’s race.

It's been a fiery campaign marked by Lake's unfounded claims about the 2020 election and Hobbs' role as the Arizona secretary of state.

Where we expect results this evening

In both states taking center stage tonight, large counties will release a significant number of results.

Clark County, Nevada: Clark County, which is Nevada's most populous and encompasses Las Vegas, will release results from its remaining 22,000 mail ballots tonight, according to county registrar Joe Gloria.

This batch of results will be released “sometime this afternoon or early evening,” he said, and he estimated that this could happen around 7 p.m. ET at the earliest.  

Washoe County, Nevada: Washoe County plans to release its next batch of results on Saturday night around 11 p.m. ET, according to election officials.

There are approximately 12,000 ballots remaining to be counted there, officials said, though it’s unknown how many will be in Saturday night’s batch of results.

Washoe County, which encompasses Reno, is Nevada's second-largest by population and is considered a swing county.

Maricopa County, Arizona: More results are expected around 10 p.m. ET Saturday from Maricopa County, which is the most populous in Arizona.

Elections supervisor Bill Gates told CNN he expects a vote drop similar to last night, when the county reported about 80,000 more votes.

Gates said Friday that there are about 275,000 ballots left to count in the county, which includes Phoenix.

In a series of tweets Saturday, Maricopa County, Arizona, officials pushed back against election disinformation and baseless fraud claims as they continued to count the vote in Arizona. 

The message continued: "CANDIDATES: All legal votes will be counted, including votes for you. If you have the most votes in the final tally, you will be elected. If you do not have the most votes, you will have lost your election."

The account adds, wryly: "SOCIAL MEDIA BOTS: Your disapproval is duly noted but your upvotes and retweets will not be part of this year’s totals. This is not meant as an affront to your robot overlords, it’s just not allowed for in Arizona law." 

Some background: On Friday night, the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted a statement criticizing the vote-counting process as too slow in Maricopa County.

Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake baselessly claimed Thursday that election officials were intentionally delaying results to make her look worse. And former President Donald Trump has claimed, without proof, that county officials are rigging the vote in favor of Democrats.

The county's top election official, a Republican, has repeatedly pushed back on those claims.

"It's really, really unfortunate that some candidates, some activists are deciding to spread this misinformation,” the chairman of the county's Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, told CNN's Jim Acosta. “We have spent weeks at Maricopa County, getting that word out that people should not anticipate results on election night or even the next day. That it does take this long."

CNN's Tara Subramaniam contributed to this report.

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria repudiated former President Donald Trump's claim that they are corruptly “finding all sorts of ballots” in his county – and stressed that his team is simply following the law as they continue to count the remaining votes. 

Gloria was referring to ballots that are still trickling into election offices. In Nevada, ballots that are postmarked by Tuesday, Election Day, can still be counted, as long as they arrive by Saturday. About 270 such ballots arrived on Saturday, Gloria said, though it’s unclear how many were postmarked by Tuesday.

Trump's claims: In a Truth Social post on Friday night, Trump baselessly accused the county of “finding” ballots and attempting to steal the election from Republicans. 

"Now they're finding all sorts of Ballots in Clark County, Nevada. They are pulling out all stops to steal the Election from Adam Laxalt," Trump falsely claimed, referring to the GOP nominee for Senate, Adam Laxalt, who is running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

At Gloria’s press conference Saturday, he also said that his office hasn’t heard from any candidates with complaints about voter fraud.

“We haven't heard anything from any campaign related to fraud or questioning" the results, Gloria said.

While Trump has baselessly claimed that the Senate election is being stolen from Laxalt, the candidate himself hasn’t peddled those same unfounded allegations. Laxalt acknowledged in a series of tweets Saturday morning that Masto has a legitimate path to victory if the remaining ballots from Clark County break her way.

Maricopa County, Arizona, elections supervisor Bill Gates said Saturday that protesters outside the building where ballots are being counted are “peaceful” and that he has “every reason to believe they will continue to be peaceful.”

"But I'll tell you what, the people in Maricopa County overwhelmingly appreciate the work that's being done by these folks, the long hours that they're working. But people are excited to get the results, and I completely understand that. We just ask for their patience," he added.

Gates said he anticipates a vote drop similar to last night, when the county reported about 80,000 more votes, which included many of the mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Election Day.

Gates said Friday that there are about 275,000 ballots left to count in the county, which includes Phoenix.

"I'm not a prognosticator. Our job here is to continue counting the votes and to get closer to having that completed," he told Acosta on Saturday.

As voters wait for the final results, some on social media have baselessly claimed Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is also the Democratic nominee for governor, had been present in a Maricopa County room where ballots were being counted.

Asked about the false claim by Acosta, Gates called it a “head-scratcher.”

“For folks to put that sort of information out there, that that woman was Katie Hobbs is just a real head-scratcher for me, and what it says to me is that these people think that the people of Maricopa County are pretty gullible, and quite frankly, the people of this country,” Gates said.

The image is a screenshot of video from a tabulation room in Maricopa County. In Arizona, live video feeds showing the ballot-counting process across the state are available to the public. 

The woman wrongly identified as Hobbs has shoulder-length brown hair and wears glasses.

“Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” reads a post from Maricopa County’s official Twitter account. “We can confirm this was a party Observer. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers who happen to wear glasses.”

Washoe County, Nevada, plans to release its next batch of results on Saturday night around 11 p.m. ET, according to election officials.

There are approximately 12,000 ballots remaining to be counted in Washoe County, though it’s unknown how many will be in Saturday night’s batch of results.

Why it matters: Washoe County, a swing county home to Reno, is the second-most populous county in Nevada.

A tiny margin separates the two candidates in Nevada's pivotal Senate race. As of Saturday morning, Republican Adam Laxalt had a lead of only 862 votes over Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.

The Nevada Senate race could ultimately determine the balance of power in the upper chamber. With CNN projecting Sen. Mark Kelly to win his race in Arizona, Democrats need to win one more seat: Nevada or Georgia, which is headed to a December runoff.

More context: The other big county to keep an eye for this race is Clark County, Nevada's largest.

An election official there said the county will release results from its remaining 22,000 mail ballots tonight, around 7 p.m. at the earliest.

There are thousands more provisional ballots to process and mail ballots that need to be "cured" in Clark County, though it's not clear how many will ultimately be counted.

In a victory speech in Phoenix on Saturday, Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly thanked state elections officials for their work through the midterms.

Kelly called them “honorable Republicans and Democrats, who are doing the important work of making sure that Arizonans’ votes and voices are heard, their votes are counted as quickly and as transparently as possible.”

CNN projected Friday that Kelly will defeat Republican Blake Masters.

Meanwhile, Masters was not ready to concede, tweeting Saturday that “we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted.”

“If, at the end, Senator Kelly has more of them than I do, then I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory,” he added.

View live results here.

The senator told CNN after his speech that he was not concerned that Masters would not concede and said his opponent “ran a good race” and that he looked forward to talking to him.

“It’s clear we won the election. I mean the math ... I’m OK, I’m pretty decent at math and you know the math supports the calls that the media, you know, has made that I won this election,” Kelly told CNN.

During his speech, Kelly called out the embrace of conspiracy theories by some members of the GOP, promised to represent all Arizonans and brought up the legacy of late Sen. John McCain.

"After a long election, it can be tempting to remain focused on the things that divide us, but we’ve seen the consequences that come when leaders refuse to accept the truth and focus more on conspiracies of the past than solving the challenges that we face today," Kelly said in the speech.

Masters has denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

A tiny margin separates the two candidates in Nevada's pivotal Senate race, and a GOP strategist told CNN the mood inside Republican Adam Laxalt's campaign is "awful."

Different factions of the Republican's operation have begun the internal blame game, feeling it is a forgone conclusion that Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto will take the lead soon, the strategist said. When asked by CNN to describe the current mood, the strategist said, "shocked and depressed."

Publicly, Laxalt laid out what he described as a "narrowed" path to victory in a pair of tweets Saturday.

As of Friday evening, Laxalt had a lead of only 862 votes over Cortez Masto. An early lead for the Republican eroded further Friday as election workers counted and released the results of more ballots.

"Multiple days in a row, the mostly mail in ballots counted continue to break in higher DEM margins than we calculated," Laxalt wrote. "This has narrowed our victory window."

In Clark County, Nevada's largest, CNN estimates there are roughly 24,000 more mail-in ballots to be counted, along with about 15,000 provisional ballots and ballots that need to be cured.

Laxalt said the race will come down to those ballots, saying that "if they continue to trend heavy DEM then (Cortez Masto) will overtake us."

If they come from GOP-leaning precincts or from only slightly Democrat-leaning areas, "then we can still win," Laxalt claimed.

For its part, Cortez Masto's campaign told CNN the team remains "confident" as it awaits further results.

Laxalt campaign responds: Brian Freimuth, Laxalt's press secretary, responded to CNN’s reporting later Saturday, saying: "Our campaign team remains confident and hopeful, and any reporting to the contrary is inaccurate and poorly-sourced."

Why it matters: The Nevada Senate race has been deadlocked for months, and it could ultimately determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.

With CNN projecting Sen. Mark Kelly to win his race in Arizona, Democrats need to win one more seat: Nevada or Georgia, which is headed to a December runoff.

Republicans need 51 seats for majority control. Democrats would have control in a 50-50 tie with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes.

View Laxalt's tweets below: