Kari Lake Takes Her Election Challenge Case to Arizona Supreme Court
Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed her election challenge of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ win in the November election at the Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Lake’s campaign tweeted, “[Kari Lake] swore to the people of Arizona that she would take our fight for election integrity to the Arizona Supreme court. Today, her attorneys filed to do just that. We pray for justice.”
We filed our Historic Election Integrity case with the Arizona Supreme Court.
Pray for our Attorneys.
Pray for the Judges.
Pray for Justice.
Pray for America. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/SgFI9FixxT— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 2, 2023
In December, a trial court judge ruled against the former news anchor, stating her legal team failed to prove with “clear and convincing” evidence that there was intentional misconduct by Maricopa County officials impacting the result of the race.
Last month, the Appeals Court of Arizona affirmed the trial judge’s ruling, though conceded Lake’s point that intentional misconduct by election officials was not what her legal team had to prove.
“We agree that there may be circumstances under which something less than intentional misconduct may suffice,” Appeals Court Chief Judge Kent E. Cattani wrote, citing case law that says unintentional mistakes could be sufficient if they affect the outcome of the race or make it uncertain.
But the judges concluded Lake’s lawyers did not prove the many problems in Maricopa County on Election Day may have changed who the winner was.
Hobbs defeated Lake by approximately 17,000 votes, or about 0.7 percent.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Lake argues that Maricopa County officials did not follow election law by failing to maintain chain-of-custody documentation of all ballots cast on Election Day, not adequately testing election equipment, and not following signature verification requirements.
Lake’s attorneys allege in their filing that there were 35,563 unaccounted-for ballots added to the total cast on Election Day after they were sent to a third-party vendor, called Runbeck Election Services, for processing. That number is significant because it exceeds Hobbs’ margin of victory.
Further casting doubt on the true winner of the election, according to Lake, ballot printers throughout Maricopa County (the Phoenix metro area) were misconfigured, causing tabulators to be unable to read ballots and leading to long lines on Election Day, when Republicans outvoted Democrats 3 to 1.
Here is the problem w/ what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. This is Anthem, north of Phoenix at about 1:15 pm. Ruby red district of about 30K people. Only one polling location. Ballot tabulators not working in the morning. 2 hr wait to vote midday and still at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/CY35yQWwq5
— Randy DeSoto (@RandyDeSoto) November 14, 2022
“Maricopa’s failure to perform mandated [logic and accuracy] testing led to tabulators rejecting ballots at nearly two-thirds of Maricopa’s 223 vote centers over 7,000 times every thirty minutes, beginning at 6:00 am and continuing past 8:00 pm — causing massive disruptions, hours-long lines and disenfranchising thousands of predominantly Republican voters on Election Day,” Lake’s court filing says.
🚨Breaking🚨
Maricopa County Tabulation & Election Center had a “heat map” in their central count showing “Republican Voter Dot Density.
Our team compared it with the locations where tabulator failures occurred on Election Day
This was a targeted attack on Republican voters pic.twitter.com/mB0JE8a7e4
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) January 30, 2023
Finally, Lake’s appeal says that “whistleblowers conducting signature verification at [the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center] came forward with the evidence that Maricopa disregarded Arizona law and allowed tens of thousands of uncured ballots with nonmatching signatures to be counted.” Ballots are cured by election officials reaching out to confirm the identity of the voter.
Lake argues that the appeals court ruling “effectively immunizes election officials’ noncompliance with Arizona’s election laws.”
“The Legislature did not intend election officials to have this degree of insulation,” the filing reads.
America is fired up. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/FjnFA0AAah
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) February 11, 2023
The lawsuit concludes, “The undisputed facts, and the violations of law, show that Maricopa’s 2022 election must be set aside. Trust must be restored. This Court should grant review to correct this manifest error.”
The AZ Law blog reported that the Supreme Court agreed to expedite Lake’s suit.
Response briefs from Hobbs, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer are due by March 13. The justices plan to meet on March 21 to decide whether to take Lake’s case.
A version of this article originally appeared on Patriot Project.
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