It's Election Day. Governor's chair, Senate seat and more are up for grabs in Arizona

As voters went to the polls on Election Day, a tumultuous campaign season entered its final hours, with Arizona in the spotlight of the nation and the world.

Voters had concerns over inflation, abortion rights, education and the general condition of the state.

But an overarching issue was whether the mechanics of voting could be trusted.

A slate of Republican candidates vying for the top elected positions called the integrity of the 2020 elections into question and seemed to place the viability of democracy itself on the ballot.

And an Election Day glitch involving the ballot printers at certain polling places served to amplify those concerns. It was remedied within hours, and voters had options to still cast a vote. But the reaction from some voters indicated a lingering mistrust of the system.

The choice Arizonans were faced with on the ballot lured a parade of national and international journalists. The state was seen as a bellwether for the nation, if not the future of democracy globally.

Election Day coverage: Live voting updates | Arizona election results

Whether that issue would be the decisive one for Arizonans filling out their ballots was not certain.

The rate of inflation in Phoenix was among the highest in the nation. Gas prices remained high. Many pumps in the state carried a political message: Tiny stickers with a picture of President Joe Biden pointing at the price and seeming to take credit.

Biden's approval rating hovered around 42%, according to the website FiveThirtyEight. That approval rating, coupled with the typical losses a president's party faces in the midterm, could serve as an anchor for Democrats.

In the closing days of the election, Arizona saw visits by first lady Jill Biden and former President Barack Obama. But President Biden steered clear of the state.

And there was a weekslong kerfuffle about why one candidate for governor refused to debate the other.

Candidates for top offices

The biggest races included governor and U.S. Senate, but several statewide offices, nine seats in Congress and every seat in the state Legislature were also on the ballot. Voters were set to decide on 10 ballot measures and elect a Maricopa County attorney, a mayor in Peoria and city council representatives across metro Phoenix and the state.

In the governor's race, the candidates were Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Lake, less than two years ago, was the co-anchor of Phoenix’s most popular evening newscast. This was her first run for political office. In her primary, her well-honed, unflappable delivery of simple and strong conservative principles propelled her past candidates that included a former Arizona congressman and a Republican business executive who outspent her by millions.

Her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, oversaw the state’s elections as secretary of state in 2020. Hobbs became a fixture on cable television news shows, defending the state’s systems as Republicans pressed for decertification and, eventually, a glitch-filled and lengthy manual hand count of the most populous county’s ballots.

Hobbs, though, refused to take part in a television tradition: debating her general election opponent.

Hobbs said that the Republican primary debate that featured Lake and three other opponents turned into a circus. It was a feeling shared by others, including Lake herself who, during the debate, asked out loud if she were in a skit airing on “Saturday Night Live.”

Analysis: Don't count on polls in Arizona's Senate and governor's races

Lake pilloried Hobbs as a coward. A person in a chicken suit would make appearances at Lake campaign events, invoking the spirit of Hobbs.

Also haunting Hobbs: A former Arizona Senate staffer, an African American woman, discovered that she was getting paid less than her white male colleagues. Two federal juries sided with the woman and against the Legislature. Hobbs issued an initial apology to the woman she admitted later was inadequate.

The Lake campaign, twisting the nomenclature of the civil judicial system, called Hobbs a “twice-convicted racist.”

In the U.S. Senate, the incumbent Mark Kelly had a fundraising advantage that allowed him to place multiple ads on television early in the year. Often, he was clad in a casual black T-shirt, talking to concerned constituents while nodding his head. In short, the type of commercials run by a frontrunner.

Polls, however, showed the race tightening in the closing weeks.

Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, was a venture capitalist and former student of Peter Thiel, the billionaire who co-founded the online cash service, PayPal.

Masters, a first-time candidate who went to high school in Tucson, was aided by an early endorsement by Trump and $15 million of Thiel’s money.

Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he was set to give a speech and hand a packet of unspecified evidence of voter fraud to Vice President Mike Pence.

Finchem has claimed he was not anywhere near the melees between police and Trump supporters who breached the Capitol. On Twitter, he posted a photo of the riot at the U.S. Capitol and said it was the result of the public not feeling heard by their leaders. He has continually said he thought Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

His Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, served a term as Maricopa County recorder, running the 2020 election that saw his defeat to a Republican. Fontes, an attorney, himself rode into office on election discontent, defeating the longtime recorder, Helen Purcell, after an attempt to run a presidential preference election with limited resources ended with hour-long lines.

Fontes, a former U.S. Marine, can also belt out a mariachi tune. He attracted controversy when, as a strategy to mitigate COVID-19, he decided to send an early ballot to every registered voter. The court stopped him. Hobbs, as secretary of state, criticized the move.

Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh is a first-time candidate who graduated from law school in 2016. He was a Maricopa County prosecutor for four years, but when asked by The Republic, could not cite a case he handled that stuck in his memory. As a member of the Army Reserve, he spent over a year in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, he said, he didn’t recognize the United States anymore and decided to seek political office.

Hamadeh bested a crowded field of five other candidates, backed by Trump’s endorsement. He has cited what he said were widespread election issues.

Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, served eight years on the Arizona Corporation Commission, the statewide entity that regulates public utilities. Before then, she was an aide to Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. Before that, she was a political reporter for The Arizona Republic and its defunct sister afternoon paper, The Phoenix Gazette. McCain once kicked her off his campaign bus in retaliation for a story the newspaper ran, although she had not written it.

Mayes, a professor at Arizona State University’s college of sustainability, was a registered Republican until 2019.

In the state treasurer's race, the incumbent Republican Kimberly Yee faced off against Democratic lawmaker Martin Quezada. Yee had sought the Republican nomination for governor but left the crowded field and decided to seek re-election as treasurer.

The superintendent of public instruction, Kathy Hoffman, faced her first re-election bid after becoming the first Democrat to win the office in 25 years.

Her Republican opponent, Tom Horne, held the office for eight years starting in 2003. He also served as attorney general. While in that office, FBI agents following Horne to investigate allegations of campaign finance violations spotted him colliding his vehicle with a parked car and driving away. The agents said he did so to conceal an afternoon tryst. 

While the other statewide Republican candidates, including Masters, would make campaign appearances together, Horne stayed away, not aligning himself with the Trump-focused wing of the party.

There was also a slew of propositions on the ballot, some of which were matters referred to voters by the Legislature, asking voters to curtail their collective ability to change Arizona’s laws. Among them: Measures on medical debt, voter ID and whether undocumented Arizona students can get in-state tuition rates at the state's universities and colleges.

In Congress, the state delegation stood majority Democratic, with a 5-4 split. But, the election results could flip it back to majority Republican.

Polls showed that Democrat Tom O'Halleran was in peril against the first-time Republican candidate, and combat veteran, Eli Crane.

An open seat in southern Arizona pitted Democrat Kirsten Engel, a former state lawmaker, against Republican Juan Ciscomani, a former senior adviser to Gov. Doug Ducey. Analysts had the district leaning towards the Republicans.

In the Arizona Legislature, there were five districts whose results would determine which party controlled the House or Senate.

Democrats fielded six candidates for the 10 open seats on those parties, part of a so-called "single shot" strategy designed to give one Democrat a clear path to a seat. If all six won, the House would likely be locked in a 30-30 tie, requiring at least one Democrat vote for a bill to advance.

If all five Democratic Senate candidates won, barring surprise outcomes in the other districts, the Senate would also have a tie.

Election guide: November 2022

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Should Republicans hold on to the majority, it would give clout to a newly formed Arizona Freedom Caucus that aimed to counter both Democrats and mainstream Republicans.

State Rep. Jake Hoffman, who was looking to move chambers in this election, announced the caucus in July and said it had already attracted one-third of House members. Its membership, he said, would be secret.

Hoffman was among the Republicans who convened in December 2020 and signed paperwork falsely declaring themselves Arizona's electors. They sent the documents to Congress as part of a scheme to possibly upend or delay the certification of the election by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

A Republican history but recent Democratic wins

That 2020 election still loomed large during the 2022 campaign season.

The Republican nominees for the state’s top offices – governor, secretary of state and attorney general – all made baseless claims about a stolen 2020 election central to their platform. So did Masters, the Republican candidate vying for a U.S. Senate seat.

Making such a claim seemed to be a prerequisite for the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, which all four top Republican candidates earned.

Democrats, meanwhile, were banking on voters finding the Republican candidates too extreme. That word, and synonyms like radical and dangerous, peppered those candidates’ television ads.

Arizona, for decades, was a reliably Republican state. Until the narrow victory of Joe Biden in 2020 – a result still not accepted by many Arizona Republican voters and officeholders – Arizona had not given the state’s votes to a Democratic nominee for president since Bill Clinton’s re-election bid in 1996.

But the past two elections tipped toward the Democratic Party. Both of the state's U.S. Senate seats were won by Democrats. The congressional delegation turned majority Democratic. And three statewide office seats were won by Democrats.

To come out on top this election, Republicans needed to hold on to their built-in advantage in voter registration. They also looked to expand that base by mobilizing infrequent voters who became energized by Trump’s candidacy and presidency.

Democrats needed to peel away establishment Republicans put off by the growing insurgent wing of their party. They also looked to make access to abortion a key issue. They warned that Republican control of Arizona could cause reproductive freedom for women to be governed by a law minted in the state’s territorial days more than a century ago.

While some Arizonans were heading to the polls on Tuesday, still labeled as Election Day on the calendar, a sizeable portion of eligible voters already had cast their ballots, either by mail or by showing up in polling places to vote early.

Glitches with voter tabulation system in Maricopa County

But in this cycle, the top Republican candidates were encouraging supporters to vote in person on Election Day. They continued to sow mistrust of the early voting system that has been used in Arizona for decades with little evidence of fraud or misplaced ballots.

Polling places opened Tuesday to some long lines. And, after voting started, 30% of the sites reported an issue with tabulators not reading ballots properly.

Voters were told they could put their ballot in a secure box — colloquially labeled Door No. 3 — where it could be tabulated later. But some voters expressed skepticism their ballot ever would be counted if placed there.

Kelli Ward, head of Arizona's Republican Party, amplified that feeling by telling her followers on Twitter to not put their ballots in that secured box.

By about 3 p.m., elections officials had figured out the problem. The printers used for ballots weren't making certain formatting marks dark enough. But by the time that benign explanation came, conservatives still certain the 2020 election was stolen from Trump had engaged in hours of conspiratorial dialogue online.

Charlie Kirk, the head of the influential Phoenix-based non-profit that engages young conservatives, called that arrests be made. "It's criminal," he wrote on Twitter.

Lake cast her Election Day vote in downtown Phoenix, saying she intentionally sent to a liberal area certain that the machines would function properly there.

What happens after the votes are counted

Election Day might not necessarily mark the end of campaigning.

Candidates might still be arguing for their victory in the coming days, weeks or months. Some appeals might be formally aimed at judges, but others might be aimed at the public, hoping to delegitimize the certified winner.

If nothing else, the 2020 election cycle gave Arizonans, and observers around the country, a window into the post-election procedures involved in making the voters’ word official.

Each Arizona county must canvass the results of the election by Nov. 28, 20 days after the election, legally closing the book on the results.

The state of Arizona has the statewide canvass by  Dec. 5, the fourth Monday after the election.

Then, according to state law, the challenges can begin.

And, there might be challenges.

Lake has said she detected fraud in the August primary election, though after her victory she never mentioned what troubles she perceived. She told ABC News that she would accept the results of November’s general election if it was “fair, honest and transparent.” She did not provide a clear answer when asked if she would be the one to make that determination.

Finchem suggested in June that he would not accept the results of the August primary should he lose his primary race for Arizona secretary of state. “Ain't gonna be no concession speech coming from this guy,” he said at a gathering at a Chandler backyard patio with Lake.

Finchem, in his general election debate with his opponent, said he found no issues with the August primary he won.

Lake and Finchem filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to block Arizona’s voting procedures saying they violated the civil rights of the state’s electorate.

Along with election denial came related issues. Republican candidates decried mandating vaccines against COVID-19, instituting mask mandates or closing schools in the face of another pandemic.

There was decrying of perceived teaching in schools of entrenched racism, given the label critical race theory. There were fears that children in schools were being groomed to fall prey to sexual predators, or question their sexual or gender identity.

And, given that Arizona is a border state, there were plenty of promises to close the porous border with Mexico. Only this cycle, the flow of migrants – mainly consisting of families from Central America seeking asylum – was described as an “invasion.”

The modern conservative movement was birthed in Arizona when Sen. Barry Goldwater made a run for president in 1964. His candidacy was one of the worst trouncing in U.S. presidential politics, but his ideas and ideals persisted.

The state was known for conservatives like Supreme Court justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, the latter of whom stretched the party to fit his Libertarian leanings under its tent.

But the last two statewide elections went well for Arizona Democrats.

In 2018, then-U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema won a U.S. Senate seat, becoming the first Democrat to do so in Arizona for 20 years. And, though Gov. Doug Ducey was reelected, Democrats grabbed statewide offices including secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction and a Corporation Commission seat. That year, the state’s congressional delegation became majority Democrat.

In 2020, Biden carried Arizona. Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and husband to former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt, became the state’s second Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

Political analysts said that those two elections were decided in pockets of suburban Phoenix, particularly in the cities of Chandler, Gilbert and Scottsdale that hugged the Loop 101 freeway. Women, the analysis showed, tipped the state out of the Republican column.

Elections officials warned in the days leading up to Election Day that results wouldn't likely be known for days.

Vote counting in Arizona takes time, as the flood of ballots usually dropped off at the polls on Election Day needs verification. But the results will be final soon, although conversations over what they say about the state of the state will be just beginning.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Election Day in Arizona: What's at stake and who is on the ballot?