Appeals Court Rejects Kari Lake Attempt To Steal AZ Governorship

0
605

Kari Lake is still losing.

The Arizona Republican who lost that state’s race for governor last year, and whose victorious opponent has been serving as governor of Arizona for what will soon be two months, is still challenging her defeat in court, and she’s still losing. Predictably, an Arizona appeals court has now rejected Lake’s push, in which she evidently wanted a new election to be held. In doing so, Lake is modeling her politics after those of Trump, who himself has clamored for somehow getting back into the White House completely separate from the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Trump has even talked about pushing aside at least portions of the Constitution in support of that aim, with the ex-president, of course, still claiming that widespread election fraud was present despite the total lack of relevantly supporting evidence. As for Lake, the appeals judges concluded the evidence just wasn’t there.

By trial, her case rested on two areas of contention, including the handling of the printers producing ballots at polling places in Maricopa County (Arizona’s most populated) and what’s known as the chain of custody for ballots. Lake’s side presented a witness during trial who spoke of hearing from some third-party about how staff at a vendor used by the county in handling ballots were supposedly allowed to just add their own ballots and those of family members without officially submitting these votes. (There was also an affidavit.) That would obviously be a breach, but it’s simply unclear there’s any evidence — at all, anywhere — that something like that was actually happening. Generally speaking, Lake needed to show that there was intentional misconduct targeting the election and that such actually affected how it ended. She explicitly argued against needing to actually meet that standard, although at face value, the idea seems pretty rational.

The latter part of the equation could stand reasonably on its own, but confirming and quantifying an actual effect on the outcome was something Lake just couldn’t do, since the supposed fraud was, you know, imaginary. “Lake also asserts that the superior court erred by requiring proof that the alleged official misconduct “did in fact affect the result” of the election, positing instead that some unquantifiable uncertainty suffices,” the appeals court said. “But election results are not rendered uncertain unless votes are affected “in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election.” This rule requires a competent mathematical basis to conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”

Among examples of this, the court noted how voters who encountered problems with the printers at their polling places, some of which made ballots difficult for the scanners to actually read, could still vote, including through securely leaving their ballot for later tabulation of the sort already done at central processing locations in Arizona and in a back-up option specifically available in Maricopa County for many years. Predictably, Lake indicated she’d appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, so observers can prepare for the perpetual election and court case-loser to certainly lose again.

Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons