If you listen to Katie Hobbs, the Arizona Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate running against Kari Lake, you would think that Lake represents the greatest threat to public confidence in the upcoming election. She continually claims that Kari Lake “won’t accept” the results of the election if she somehow loses. (As if “not accepting” election results somehow voids the election.) But there is a much more significant and glaringly obvious problem with the governor’s race that Hobbs never seems to mention. The Arizona Secretary of State is charged with overseeing the election and ensuring its accuracy and validity. How is it that Katie Hobbs is overseeing an election where she is a candidate? Isn’t that a blatant conflict of interest? Well, it’s blatant enough that members of her own party are now calling on her to recuse herself, and Time Magazine has chosen to run the story.

As election officials across the country brace for candidates to contest the election results in possibly unprecedented numbers, the most explosive challenge could unfold in Arizona, where Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake is preparing for a fight.

The former local news anchor has made casting doubt on President Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona a centerpiece of her campaign, despite multiple investigations having found no evidence of substantial fraud. On Tuesday, her campaign hired one of the lawyers who represented Donald Trump’s 2020 election lawsuits, the latest signal that she might dispute the election outcome if she loses to her Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. And members of both parties now say that Hobbs may be feeding the potential for conflict by planning to oversee an election in which she’s a candidate.

Among the people publicly calling on Hobbs to recuse herself are two former Arizona secretaries of state, one a Democrat and the other a Republican. One of them suggested that oversight of the election should be turned over to either the attorney general or the Maricopa County recorder.

While the Secretary of State doesn’t conduct the election, her office is tasked with collecting and verifying the results submitted by each county. In the case of a recount (and this race is very close in the latest polls), her office would be heavily involved. And yet, Hobbs’ spokesperson came out and said that she has “no intention” of recusing herself from that role.

I could understand Hobbs being reluctant if she were being asked to step down from her office entirely. That’s what happened when Brian Kemp was asked by Stacey Abrams to step down as secretary of state in Georgia when he was running for governor against her. (Kemp declined.) But Hobbs is only being asked to turn over the responsibility for overseeing her own election, not to abandon her office completely.

How much faith should Arizona voters put in the results under these circumstances, particularly if there is a recount? The same woman who has hidden away in her campaign office and refused to debate her opponent or answer questions as to what she would do as the governor wants to be the person in charge of counting the votes? This should have been among the easiest calls for a political candidate to make in the history of the country.

The irony in this story is as thick as taffy. A spokeswoman for Hobbs responded by accusing Kari Lake of “undermining the Constitution and the democratic process” by questioning the results of a previous election. How she managed to do that while not holding any political office has yet to be explained. And yet keeping control of a closely contested election that Hobbs herself is running in is somehow fine and dandy. It’s almost too much to believe, even in today’s torturous political minefield.