Kari Lake Sues Arizona’s Largest County in an Attempt to Overturn Her Loss

The defeated Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, filed a lawsuit on Friday contesting the election results that the state certified this week. After spending weeks making a series of public comments and social media posts intended to cast doubt on the results of a campaign she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, Ms. Lake filed a lawsuit. Documents certified that loss and were signed on Monday by Ms. Hobbs, who is the current secretary of state.

Former television anchor Ms. Lake based her campaign on unfounded conspiratorial assertions that Donald J. Trump, who had supported her, had had the 2020 election stolen from him. Voters have been asked for their Election Day experiences on social media and at rallies for the past month by Ms. Lake, her campaign, and other allies. After filing her lawsuit on Friday evening, Ms. Lake tweeted, “If the process was fraudulent, then so are the results.” “People, stay tuned.”

Must Check:

• Krzysztof Szubert Missing Chicago: Body of Missing Polish Man Found From Lake Michigan, Investigation Ongoing
• After the Pilot Flies Close to Residences in Lake County Paramotorists Want Responses

In a tweet of her own, Ms. Hobbs referred to Ms. Lake’s lawsuit as “baseless,” calling it the “latest desperate attempt to destroy our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.” Ms. Lake filed a lawsuit against Ms. Hobbs and representatives of Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona and home to Phoenix.

The suit contends that the election was manipulated in Maricopa County and that she should be proclaimed the winner. The 70-page statement is based on a jumble of charges, including claims that voters and poll workers agreed with Ms. Lake about the election’s poor organization and polling data. Some of the information is from the 2020 election, not the one from last month. In other charges, officials are charged with wrongdoing for participating in initiatives to combat election-related falsehoods.

Fields Moseley, a spokeswoman for Maricopa County, asserted that campaigns should present their case for contesting results in court. Maricopa County respects the electoral process and is eager to provide information on how the general election will be run in 2022 as well as the steps we took to make sure every eligible voter had the chance to cast their ballot, according to Mr. Moseley.

A majority of the experts listed in the lawsuit and one of the attorneys who brought the case, Kurt Olsen, is a part of a loose network of election deniers headed by Mike Lindell, the owner of a pillow company who has been promoting election machine conspiracies since early 2021. Bryan Blehm, a different Lake attorney, represented the contractor Cyber Ninjas during the partisan audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County last year. This year, he also defended the Cochise County supervisors in a lawsuit regarding an attempt to carry out a hand-counted audit plan.

In addition to Ms. Lake’s legal action, two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections—Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, who ran for attorney general—also filed complaints on Friday. The Republican National Committee joined Mr. Hamadeh’s complaint as he trails his opponent in the election being recounted by 511 votes.

Mr. Hamadeh earlier filed a lawsuit around the end of last month in an effort to have the election thrown out, but the court in Maricopa County dismissed it because it was submitted too soon. His current challenge — filed in Mohave County, a Republican stronghold where he won 75 percent of the vote — is more restricted than Ms. Lake’s, saying that it is not contesting the election’s validity.

But like Ms. Lake, Mr. Hamadeh is requesting a court order to declare him the winner and reverse the election results, arguing that he is just citing “some flaws and inconsistencies” rather than widespread fraud. “Maricopa County encountered unprecedented and intolerable challenges on Election Day,” Mr. Hamadeh said on Twitter late on Friday.

The complaint, according to Mr. Hamadeh’s adversary Kris Mayes’ attorney Dan Barr, is “based on supposition” and has “no real facts.” Early the following week, he claimed, he would submit motions to dismiss it and transfer it to Maricopa County. Mr. Finchem lost by more than 120,000 votes and was one of several secretaries of state candidates throughout the nation that disputed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Finchem requested that the Maricopa County court pronounce him the winner of the election and declare Arizona to have “failed miserably” to conduct a “full, fair, and secure election” in his lawsuit. Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent unsuccessful attempt to prevent certification of the election results, filed that lawsuit. Mr. Olsen, one of Ms. Lake’s attorneys, also took part in an earlier federal lawsuit that Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem unsuccessfully filed.

Although it was submitted ahead of the election on November 8, a federal judge concluded earlier this month that it contained “false, deceptive, and unsubstantiated factual representations” regarding electoral processes. The judge ruled that those false claims required punishment. He said he will evaluate who among the lawyers involved in the case should be sanctioned at a later date.

Requests for comment from the campaigns of Mr. Olsen and Ms. Lake went unanswered. When contacted for comment, Mr. Finchem’s attorney did not answer right away. Long lines and other issues on Election Day in Maricopa County, which Ms. Lake contends resulted in voter disenfranchisement, were the subject of some of her charges. The New York Times examined several testimonies from voters, election officials, and observers last month.

These testimonies were either shared on social media by Ms. Lake and her supporters or retold in open forums after the election. While most voters stated that they had been inconvenienced by the long wait lines, the examination discovered that they had eventually been allowed to cast their votes. According to county officials, over 30% of the county’s voting stations experienced printer issues.

Because of the printing issue, some of those ballots were disallowed by on-site tabulators, which are the devices that count votes. Voters could drop off their votes in a safe box to be processed at a different location rather than by the on-site tabulator thanks to a backup system the county had set up.

However, several voters refused to use the polling places because they did not trust the voting procedures. According to officials, those voters had other options, such as casting their ballots somewhere else. Long queues were caused by the circumstance at several of the polling places, but the county claims that everyone who wanted to vote was able to do so.