The Arizona state Supreme Court has imposed sanctions on legal representation for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor in last year’s elections who barely lost and has been challenging her defeat in court essentially ever since. She’s one of the only Trump-aligned candidates from the midterms who has taken false allegations of misconduct in those elections this far. Predictably, she just keeps losing.
The formal penalties for Lake’s team concern her repeated insistence that it’s an established fact tens of thousands of ballots were added to the count from Maricopa County after ballots were received by a third-party vendor relied upon by local authorities in the tabulation process. In fact, that wasn’t shown, and it’s never been shown, although Lake’s team even used testimony at trial claiming — based on somebody else’s remarks — there was an opportunity for staff at this company to add family ballots to the count without going through official channels.
“In her Complaint, Lake set forth colorable claims, including ballot chain-of-custody claims, that were rejected following an evidentiary hearing in the trial court, and she duly but unsuccessfully (except for the laches issue) challenged those rulings on appeal,” the sanctions order said. “However, she has repeatedly asserted that it is an “undisputed” fact that 35,563 ballots were added or “injected” at Runbeck, the third-party vendor. Not only is that allegation strongly disputed by the other parties, this Court concluded and expressly stated that the assertion was unsupported by the record, and nothing in Lake’s Motion for Leave to file a motion for reconsideration provides reason to revisit that issue. Thus, asserting that the alleged fact is “undisputed” is false; yet Lake continues to make that assertion in her Motion for Leave.”
Lake’s misrepresentation may originate with a discrepancy between an estimate regarding ballot totals and a more precise number. She has also misrepresented other data in the course of this ongoing legal challenge, failing to grasp or at least acknowledge how ballot rejections recorded at polling place scanners on Election Day didn’t mean that many individual ballots were rejected. The numbers were totals of individual rejections, not ballots, and individual ballots may have been successfully scanned and were, in general, definitely counted through some means after polling. The sanctions under which her legal representation was placed require the payment of $2,000 in fines.
Image: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons
