Kari Lake loses suit over her defeat in Arizona governor’s race

• A judge threw out Republican Kari Lake’s challenge to her loss.
• The judge said that Lake’s witnesses did not know of any intentional wrongdoing.
• “The Court can’t replace clear and convincing evidence with speculation or guesswork,” Thompson said.

A judge ruled on Saturday that Lake’s claims of widespread wrongdoing that affected the results of the 2022 general election were not backed up by enough evidence.

A judge threw out Republican Kari Lake’s challenge to her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race. She said that problems with ballot printers at some polling places on Election Day were the result of deliberate wrongdoing, but the judge said that wasn’t true.

In a decision on Saturday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer at the time, said that the court did not find clear and convincing evidence of the widespread wrongdoing that Lake said changed the results of the 2022 general election.

The judge said that Lake’s witnesses did not know of any intentional wrongdoing.

“The Court can’t replace clear and convincing evidence with speculation or guesswork,” Thompson said.

Lake lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes. She was one of the most vocal 2022 Republicans to support former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the focus of her campaign. Most of the other people who didn’t believe the election results in November gave up, but Lake hasn’t. Instead, she asked the judge to either call her the winner or make Maricopa County do another vote.

Lawyers for Lake focused on problems with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County, where more than 60% of Arizona’s voters live. Because the printers were broken, they made ballots that were too light for the people counting the votes at the polling places to be able to read. In some places, lines backed up because of the chaos.

County officials say that everyone had a chance to vote and that all ballots were counted, even the ones that were messed up by the printers. These ballots were taken to the elections department headquarters where they were counted by more advanced machines. They are looking into what’s causing the printer problems right now.

Lake’s lawyers also said that the ballots’ chain of custody was broken at a facility off-site where a contractor scans mail-in ballots to get them ready for processing. They say that workers at the facility put their own mail-in ballots in the pile instead of sending them through the proper channels, and that there was no paperwork to show that the ballots were moved. The county says that the claim is false.

Lake’s chances of winning her challenge were very low. She had to show not only that there was misconduct, but also that it was done to keep her from winning and that the wrong woman was named the winner as a result.

Her lawyers pointed to a witness who looked at ballots for her campaign and found 14 ballots with 19-inch (48-centimeter) images printed on 20-inch paper. This meant that a tabulator wouldn’t be able to read the ballots. The witness said that someone had changed the settings on those printers, but elections officials didn’t believe him.

County officials say that the images on the ballots were a little bit smaller than they should have been because a tech worker who was looking for solutions to Election Day problems used the shrink-to-fit feature on a printer. They say that turning on the feature changed about 1,200 ballots and that those ballots were copied so that a tabulator could read them. Officials said that in the end, these votes were counted.

A pollster testified on Lake’s behalf and said that technical problems at polling places had kept enough people from voting that it would have changed the outcome of the race in Lake’s favour. But an expert who was called to testify by election officials said that the pollster’s claim that 25,000 to 40,000 people who would have voted but didn’t because of problems on Election Day was not supported by any evidence.

Eight of the ten claims Lake made in her lawsuit had already been thrown out by Thompson. Lake said that Hobbs, in her role as secretary of state, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer acted like censors when they flagged social media posts with false information about the election so that Twitter could remove them. He also didn’t believe her claims that Republicans were being treated unfairly and that voting by mail was against the law.

On Jan. 2, Hobbs becomes governor.

Earlier on Friday, another judge threw out Republican Abraham Hamadeh’s challenge to the results of the Arizona attorney general race he ran against Democrat Kris Mayes. The court decided that Hamadeh, who came in 511 votes behind Mayes but hasn’t given up the race, didn’t show that there were mistakes in the way the votes were counted as he claimed.

On Thursday, the results of recounts in the races for attorney general, state superintendent, and a state legislative seat will be presented in court.

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