Kari Lake Wants to Take Her Case All the Way to Ariz. Supreme Court, and She Just Made It Official
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed a petition Sunday appealing her election challenge lawsuit to the Arizona Supreme Court.
On Dec. 24, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled in favor of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ win over Lake in the November general election.
Normally, an appeal would first go to the Arizona Court of Appeals before going to the state Supreme Court.
However, Lake’s attorneys argued in their petition to the high court, “This matter presents novel legal issues of statewide importance.”
The court filing quotes the state Constitution, which says, “All elections shall be free and equal, and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”
Lake’s lawyers also contended that the state Supreme Court must clarify whether Thompson rightly applied the law when he concluded that Lake had to show “clear and convincing evidence” of intentional misconduct by election officials that impacted the overall race.
In the appeal, the legal team argued the correct standard was showing a “preponderance of the evidence” that misconduct or illegal votes rendered the outcome of the election “uncertain.”
They wrote that they easily met this standard, meaning the trial judge should have decertified Hobbs’ win and ordered a new election.
Here is what they actually needed to prove at trial; that by a preponderance of the evidence, misconduct or illegal votes render the outcome UNCERTAIN. They did this.
Lake is asking the higher court to order a new election. That is the remedy being sought. pic.twitter.com/eRbkyegYHw
— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) December 31, 2022
Lake included all 10 counts in her appeal that were in her original complaint.
Thompson set aside eight counts in the GOP candidate’s complaint, allowing just two to go to trial: one regarding the ballot printers and another dealing with ballot chain of custody.
In their legal filing with the Supreme Court, the attorneys wrote that the evidence put forward at trial proved that Maricopa County officials “caused the chaos arising at nearly two-thirds of Maricopa’s 223 vote centers [on Election Day], admitted after first denying, the illegally misconfigured ballots were injected into the election, causing tabulators to rejects tens of thousands of ballots, disproportionately targeting Republican voters.”
The misprinted ballots could not be read by ballot tabulators, causing or contributing to hours-long lines forming in many of these locations.
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 argued that since Republicans voted 3-to-1 over Democrats on Election Day, what happened was large-scale vote suppression of her supporters.
In addition to printer issues, she alleged more than 300,000 ballots lacked chain-of-custody documentation.
The GOP candidate’s legal team also said the total number of ballots the county reported in the election increased by nearly 25,000 from Nov. 9, the day after the contest, to Nov. 11.
That number is significant because it exceeds Hobbs’ approximately 17,000-vote margin of victory over Lake.
Lake’s legal team further stated in its petition to the Supreme Court that Maricopa officials “allowed tens of thousands of ballots with voters’ signatures which clearly did not match the record signature and were not properly cured to be counted in the 2022 general election.”
With a 17k margin between @KariLake and Hobbs, these 3 points should immediately call for a new election to be held in Arizona.
– No chain-of-custody for 300,000 ballots
– Inexplicable injection of 25k ballots
– Thousands of ballots with voters’ signatures that don’t match the- pic.twitter.com/8TUBpGOJcd— Merissa Hansen🇺🇸 (@merissahansen17) January 1, 2023
The attorneys concluded that Hobbs was being seated “under a cloud of electoral uncertainty and impropriety.”
“This action requires this Court’s speedy, final resolution, without resort to an intermediate decision by the Court of Appeals,” they said.
Lake told talk show host Larry Elder last week, “We believe we proved without a shadow of a doubt misconduct, malfeasance, and just complete maladministration in the running of our elections here in Maricopa County.”
.@KariLake: “We believe we proved without a shadow of a doubt misconduct, malfeasance, and just complete maladministration in the running of our elections here in Maricopa County.” pic.twitter.com/tLLlGJOmDc
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) December 30, 2022
Lake also tweeted, “I am standing up for the people of this state. The people who were done wrong on Election Day and the millions of people who live outside of Maricopa County, whose vote was watered down by this bogus election in Maricopa County.”
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