This Is Why Kari Lake Can't File Her Main Lawsuit Until All Arizona Counties Certify the Election
The ongoing saga over Arizona’s Nov. 8 governor’s race continues, and this time around, MAGA candidate Kari Lake’s plans to file suit contesting the results have run into a bit of a hiccup.
Lake, a boisterous America First candidate known best for her frequent spars with the media, began slamming Arizona’s voting system since long before any ballots were cast.
This has been driven in part by the fact that her opponent and presumed governor-elect, Katie Hobbs, is currently serving as Arizona’s secretary of state, and has since been vindicated by the utter fiasco that unfolded in Maricopa County on Election Day, where vote tabulation machine malfunctions most significantly impacted Republican candidates.
So as final vote totals leave Lake just 17,000 votes behind, prompting her staunch refusal to concede to Hobbs, there was no doubt she and her legal team would plan to sue — and they have since done exactly that.
There’s only one problem.
As Lake shared on Twitter on Thursday, she can’t file a lawsuit challenging the results of the election until after the election is actually certified.
This is set to take place on Monday when the current governor, secretary of state (Hobbs, in this case), attorney general, and chief justice will convene to do so, as Time noted.
Because under Arizona Law you can’t challenge a election until it has been certified. So when the state certifies the election, we will challenge it.
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) December 1, 2022
Interestingly enough, thanks to the issues in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county by a longshot, a number of other counties didn’t even want to certify the election.
“We believe that Mohave County voters were disenfranchised by the problems that they had in Maricopa County,” Mohave County Board of Supervisors chairman Ron Gould told Real America Voice TV’s “The War Room” this week.
More than 1.5 million of the total 2.5 million ballots cast on Nov. 8 came from Maricopa County, where issues at 70 polling places caused long lines and hours of delay on Election Day.
As Lake and other GOP candidates have highlighted, Republican voters had a strong turnout at the polls, so Maricopa’s polling place disaster has prompted accusations of voter disenfranchisement.
REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican.
When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up.
This is voter suppression targeting a political party.
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) November 12, 2022
“Their mistakes are bigger than our entire county vote, and I think it’s disenfranchised the rural voters across the state, not to mention that it disenfranchises Maricopa County voters and Republican voters, in particular, who are more likely to cast their ballot at the poll” on Election Day, Gould explained. “So any problems at the poll affect Republicans more than they would affect Democrats.”
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, however, did not take the concerns of these counties very well, however.
She reportedly threatened Gould and his colleagues with arrests and felony charges if they continued to refuse to certify the election, which they ultimately did “under duress” on Monday.
Whatever you think about Kari Lake, who previously called on Hobbs to recuse herself from the election certification process due to what many might describe as an obviously glaring conflict of interest, it’s hard to deny that this whole election fiasco appears to leave concerned voters and lawmakers stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Counties that refused to certify the election were threatened with legal action by one of the candidates and forced into compliance, while the candidate who lost and is alleging election malfeasance has to wait until the election she claims is illegitimate is officially legitimized to proceed with her legal challenge.
It’s certainly a mess.
The really crazy thing is, thanks to the highly suspicious antics that led to the Jan. 6 incursion on Capitol Hill, questioning the results of an election has become tantamount to floating the theory that the moon landing was a hoax or that the earth is flat in the eyes of millions of Americans.
Yet the fact remains that it is well within the interest of every single voter, candidate, and party to make sure our elections are being conducted legitimately and fairly.
This is a legitimate concern whether someone is alleging collusion with Russia or a shady, underhanded bid on the part of a sitting Democratic secretary of state to manipulate the results of a heated governor’s race in a deep-purple state.
As in the case of each of these examples, then, the proof will be in the pudding, whether that’s a nearly two-year special counsel investigation or litigation challenging the results of said election.
We’ve seen the results of the Russia “collusion” probe, all I’m saying is, let’s see the results of the GOP’s fight in Arizona.
I’m certainly ready and waiting.
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