Kari Lake Is Not Done Fighting Yet, Gives Important Update on Her Election Challenge
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake confirmed Wednesday night that her election challenge will first go to the Arizona Court of Appeals before going on to the state’s Supreme Court.
“My court case will be going before the Appeals Court prior to the Arizona Supreme Court because it’s already been scheduled for review,” she tweeted.
“This decision was done without prejudice & I am confident the case will end up in their hands eventually. We’re moving forward,” Lake said.
My court case will be going before the Appeals Court prior to the Arizona Supreme Court because it’s already been scheduled for review.
This decision was done without prejudice & I am confident the case will end up in their hands eventually.
We’re moving forward.
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) January 5, 2023
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.
Lake’s legal team filed a petition Sunday with the state Supreme Court seeking to bypass the appeals court.
The candidate’s appeal includes all 10 counts that were in her original complaint.
Thompson set aside eight counts in her complaint, allowing just two to go to trial: one regarding the ballot printers being misconfigured and another dealing with ballot chain of custody.
In their legal filing with the Supreme Court, the GOP candidate’s 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.”
A cybersecurity expert testified at trial last month that the change in the printer setting could not have been accidental.
“These are not a bump against the printer and the settings change,” Clay Parikh said.
“There are security configurations,” he said. “I’ve reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script, which by any large organization that has to do multiple systems is the standard.”
The misprinted ballots contributed to hours-long lines forming in many polling locations.
I was outside a polling location in SE Chandler for 3 hours Tues morning as a campaign supporter; we were told that polling locations in N Gilbert were down, so those voters were being sent to ours…wonder how many never voted at all, on leaving Gilbert?https://t.co/bNmK9rkTPa
— Jennifer Cory Alvey (@Jennife97135834) 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.
Lake’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.
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
Lake’s attorneys further wrote in their petition to the state 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.”
In light of these and other issues, Lake is seeking a new election in Maricopa County.
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