Although some of the losing candidates aligned with Trump opted to essentially just leave after the 2022 elections featured what was sometimes a wipeout for the ex-president’s corner, Kari Lake is sticking around and still lying. (She’s the Republican who lost in Arizona’s race for governor.)
This week, an Arizona appeals court formally rejected Lake’s latest attempt at undoing her election loss in 2022 to Democratic contender Katie Hobbs, who has been serving as Arizona’s governor since early last month, since in the real world, the outcome of the election isn’t uncertain. Now, officials in Maricopa County, which is Arizona’s most populated and where many Republican conspiracy theories about the midterms have focused, have released a fact-check of a particularly dramatic lie: that around a quarter of a million ballots were rejected on Election Day in the county. In short, the number shows individual times ballots were inserted into a scanner. If someone stuck their ballot in the scanner three times, that’s three added onto the total — and if that ballot was subsequently successfully scanned on the fourth try, the three stayed part of the total.
The data is entirely inconclusive, and pretending otherwise is objectively ridiculous. “The claim that nearly 250K ballots were rejected on Election Day is false and is textbook disinformation,” the Maricopa County Elections Department said in a thread on Twitter from Thursday. “The logs simply show the number of times ballots are run through the tabulators. Since ballots are secret, each attempt is considered a unique ballot. Here are the facts: 16,724 Election Day ballots were not able to be counted onsite at voting locations and were instead counted at the Elections Department.”
There were issues with the printers for ballots at some polling places in the county on Election Day, but there were secure back-up options available for voters encountering these problems. The appeals judges noted these alternatives in their rejection of Lake’s latest challenge, which she has predictably indicated she’ll now be taking to the Arizona state Supreme Court. Lake herself has previously raised certain claims about the number of times ballots were rejected from scanners at polling places on Election Day, pointing to testimony to Arizona state legislators to that effect in some of her already failed arguments before the top state court in Arizona.
Before the appeals court ruling that was released on Friday, Lake repeatedly sought — failing both times — for the Arizona state Supreme Court to go ahead and take up her case. In the appeal, she notably argued that she shouldn’t need to show in such specific terms that what she was claiming had particular impacts on the results. Instead, her idea was evidently that her allegations of a general appearance of misconduct were enough to warrant a new election being held. Whether it’s the pollster her team tried to use to make connections between a lack of response in exit polling and imagined problems in voting tied to actions by officials or the woman Lake’s team used who shared third-party accounts while testifying at the trial, they just don’t have evidence that’s meaningfully documentable in court.
The claim that nearly 250K ballots were rejected on Election Day is false and is textbook disinformation. 🧵(1/3) pic.twitter.com/l7N1AldZnk
— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) February 16, 2023
Here are the facts: 16,724 Election Day ballots were not able to be counted onsite at voting locations and were instead counted at the Elections Department. Learn more at https://t.co/dt9NLSum1Q. 🧵(3/3) pic.twitter.com/rckiIduNty
— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) February 16, 2023
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
