AZ Supreme Court Meets to Decide Fate of Kari Lake's Election Challenge
The Arizona Supreme Court reportedly met Tuesday to decide whether to review Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ win in November’s election.
In December, a trial court judge ruled against Lake, 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.
But the judges concluded that Lake’s lawyers did not prove, despite the many problems in Maricopa County on Election Day with ballot printers and tabulators and ballot chain of custody issues, that the overall outcome of the election may have been impacted.
Hobbs defeated Lake by approximately 17,000 votes or about 0.7 percent of the over 2.5 million ballots cast.
“If the Arizona Supreme Court refuses to take this case, and lets that lower court judge’s opinion stand, they are basically putting their stamp of approval on the most corrupt election we’ve ever seen in this country,” Lake told Just the News hosts Amanda Head and John Solomon on Monday.
.@KariLake: “If the Arizona Supreme Court refuses to take this case, and lets that lower court judges opinion stand, they are basically putting their stamp of approval on the most corrupt election we’ve ever seen in this country.” pic.twitter.com/B7Fkgpqree
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) March 21, 2023
“Not only that, they’re sending a message to election directors and those who run elections in towns and cities and counties across our state that election laws don’t matter. You don’t have to worry about following them. That election procedures don’t matter. They’re just simply suggestions, and you can run roughshod over all of that,” she added.
Lake cited a Rasmussen poll published last week showing that 55 percent of likely Arizona voters agreed with her that the problems in Maricopa County probably impacted the outcome of the election.
[firefly_poll]
The survey was conducted March 13-14 among 1,001 Arizona likely voters with a margin of error or +/- 3 percent.
“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 to the Supreme Court says.
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
Lake’s attorneys allege in their legal brief 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.
In a separate March 16 response to Hobbs’ legal filing, Lake further explained regarding this ballot discrepancy that Runbeck “scanned a total of 298,942 ballots on Election Day” but documentation from Maricopa County only showed a total of 263,379 Election Day drop box ballots cast, “an unaccounted for discrepancy of 35,563 ballots.”
When Runbeck counted, they recorded the tally on “inbound” delivery sheets at 263,379.
Then it counted the number of ballots it scanned and sent back:
At 298,942 ballots.
That is a difference of 35,563 ballots, inserted and scanned at Runbeck.
Playing Devils Advocate- even…
— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) March 2, 2023
Lake’s 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.”
