In November, when Arizona Republican Kari Lake lost the governor’s race to Democratic insider Katie Hobbs, there was vote confusion in Maricopa County. While spectators watched, machines malfunctioned at polling stations, prompting voters to be sent to alternative sites and ballots to be cast late or not at all. Hobbs was proclaimed the winner of the match, but Lake has since challenged the legitimacy of the voting. In Arizona, the state where all of this transpired, her cases have been unsuccessful to yet.
Lake filed a lawsuit to overturn the “rigged and stolen 2022 Gubernatorial Election in Maricopa County” arguing “that Hobbs’ swearing-in ceremony on January 2 and the “electoral chaos” that targeted and disenfranchised Republican voters in Maricopa County on Election Day justify an immediate decision from the Arizona Supreme Court and a new election,” GWP reported.
The Arizona Supreme Court declined Lake’s December request to transfer her case so that it could be expedited and bypassed the Arizona Court of Appeals. Lake’s case was next scheduled to be heard by the Arizona Court of Appeals. The transfer was disallowed “without prejudice to seeking expedited review of an adverse decision in either proceeding.”
Today, the Court of Appeals has affirmed the trial court’s decision to dismiss her lawsuit and denied Kari Lake’s motion for relief by dismissing the case. The Court agreed with the Maricopa County Superior Court’s burden of proof and concluded that Kari Lake did not offer “clear and convincing evidence” of voting fraud.
In spite of the harsh verdict, Kari and her team look positive and eager to present their case before the Arizona Supreme Court. Colton Duncan, a strategist for Kari Lake, told The GWP, “Kari Lake pledged to take this fight to the Supreme Court, and now, that is exactly what she is doing. It should come as no surprise that Kari is following through with her promise. She’s not your average Politician—that’s why America loves her.”
Duncan also tweeted that they had “confirmation” that Lake will appear before the Supreme Court!
Lake has continued to provide evidence in support of her accusations that Republican voters in the election were targeted. During a recent rally in Scottsdale, Arizona, Lake showed the crowd a GOP heat map that displayed on the wall at Maricopa County voting facilities and compared it to a map “showing all of the vote centers that were sabotaged on election day.” Interestingly, the maps were completely aligned!
A presentation to the Senate Elections Committee of Arizona revealed that Election Day tabulators rejected roughly a quarter million vote attempts. The county continues to disregard the reality that the 17,000 voters they claim were affected by voting problems correspond to the 17,000 votes that gave Hobbs the victory against Lake. Additional problems, such as the absence of chain of custody documents for hundreds of thousands of ballots, Maricopa County’s inability to check signatures on hundreds of thousands of ballots, and suspicious vote reporting errors were also highlighted in Lake’s Appeal.
In their opinion regarding the dismissal of Lake’s lawsuit, the Arizona Court of Appeals stated, ” Lake’s arguments highlight Election Day difficulties, but her request for relief fails because the evidence presented to the superior court ultimately supports the court’s conclusion that voters were able to cast their ballots, that votes were counted correctly, and that no other basis justifies setting aside the election results.”
The contested topics have been extensively covered in the media. In the 2022 Maricopa County Election, over 300,000 mismatched or fraudulent mail-in ballot signatures were improperly tallied, according to a recent presentation by the Arizona Senate Elections Committee. Investigators extrapolated the data after studying vote envelope signatures and found that About 420,000 ballot affidavits “failed signature verification in the 2020 Election,” investigators extrapolated the data. They concluded that there were “a total of 290,644 failed signatures in the 2022 Election.”
The opinion also stated, “The court chose to dismiss these counts, including the signature verification, stating, “at best, Lake’s signature-verification claim attacked Maricopa County’s process for verifying signatures that first-level reviewers questioned” finding that the procedures were to be questioned instead of the result of those procedures. Lake’s team was not allowed by the Court to examine the signatures and demonstrate that the signature verification procedures were violated.