FILE – Kari Lake speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brando, File)
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake failed to convince judges once again that she was the true winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election that went to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, as Lake’s attempt at “invalidating the election results” for a new election has fallen flat.
The Tuesday ruling from a three-judge panel on the Arizona Court of Appeals pointed out that Lake lost the election by some 17,000 votes, which Judge Sean Brearcliffe said was “perhaps [the] most important” takeaway when thinking about Lake’s claims of evidence supporting that “over 8,000 ballots” were “not counted” after Maricopa County officials “maliciously misconfigured” the ballots in question “to cause a tabulator rejection.”
In short, even if it were true that the votes weren’t counted due to “alleged misconduct,” Lake still would have lost.
More Law&Crime coverage: Kari Lake’s ‘surrender’ in election official’s defamation suit means she won’t defend rigged 2022 election claims in court
“Even if 8,000 uncounted votes had all gone to Lake,” the court said, “it would have been insufficient to overcome this differential. On this basis alone we can conclude that the court did not err in denying the Rule 60(b)(3) motion on its merits.”
Lake initially lost her case in the trial court as far back as Christmas Eve 2022, when Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson declared that Hobbs had won a “valid election,” but she’s been on the appellate trail ever since trying to find ways to revive her claims, getting another chance to argue in trial court that the county “failed to conduct signature verification on mail-in ballots as required by” law.
More Law&Crime coverage: Judge refuses to let Kari Lake inspect 2022 election ballot affidavit envelopes
But the trial judge “rejected Lake’s assertion that 8,000 ‘affected’ votes means 8,000 uncounted votes, and, based on the evidence presented at oral argument, found that Lake’s argument was an ‘unsupported bare assertion,”” the appellate court noted, adding later for clarity: “We cannot say the trial court erred in finding that Maricopa County workers complied with the statute’s comparison requirement.”
The court, highlighting its own conclusion that Lake has “failed on the merits,” warned that ruling in her favor “could wreak havoc” on election challenges in the future.
The loss is the latest in a string of defeats for Lake’s election denial campaign, whether at the highest court in the land or in state courts.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
