Kari Lake just keeps losing.
Last year’s GOP nominee for governor in Arizona, she is persisting with her challenges in court to the victory in that race of Democratic pick Katie Hobbs, who took office in early January and has been serving ever since. Now, having reached the state Supreme Court, Justices there have declined to revive all but one of the claims Lake brought, sending a contention from the defeated Republican about the process of verifying the signatures with mail-in ballots back to a trial court for review.
The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision on that specific matter doesn’t indicate that the judges saw any veracity to the merits of Lake’s allegation, which was that local authorities included ballots submitted without properly vetted signatures in the count. The high court simply concluded the claim had been improperly set aside based on certain interpretations of procedural rules.
The previous idea was that the claim was too belated because Lake was challenging the longstanding rules for handling the signatures with those ballots, but the Supreme Court argued that Lake’s challenge emerging only after the 2022 election was essentially fine. That’s mostly just procedural, though, besides evidencing — contrary to any alternative claims from the far-right — that the judicial system, in constantly and systematically rejecting allegations of widespread election fraud, really has closely examined the issue.
Other claims from Lake that remain defunct include contentions about supposedly widespread disenfranchisement of voters because of problems with printers at polling places on Election Day in Maricopa County and alleged breaches in the established chain of custody for ballots in processing, which ordinarily helps ensure no outside meddling.
Those two claims were originally a subject of the trial held earlier in this case. Lake had wanted to only need to prove her case based on a so-called preponderance of the evidence rather than very specific numbers and showings of intentional misconduct actually targeting the election and enacting substantive changes in those vote totals, meaning she’d have set aside what in reality was the documented will of the people of Arizona in last year’s race for governor because of an ostensibly supported hunch. She has also founded her case on consistent ignorance, pointing in a past argument for the state Supreme Court to have more swiftly taken up her arguments to supposedly high numbers of rejections of ballots at polling places. The figures to which she was trying to point represented individual instances a ballot wasn’t properly read by the machine and showed nothing about whether that ballot was later tabulated onsite or elsewhere.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
