Kari Lake’s final legal election challenge has been dismissed
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An Arizona court has ruled against former Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s latest attempt to challenge the results of last year’s election.
On Monday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Thompson dismissed Lake’s claim that election officials didn’t adequately verify signatures. In court documents, he wrote the court did not find clear or convincing evidence of misconduct nor did misconduct affect the results of the election, which Lake narrowly lost to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes.
“Plaintiff’s evidence and arguments do not clear the bar,” wrote Thompson, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer in 2010.
The suit was Lake’s only remaining legal challenge to last year’s results. In February, the Arizona Court of Appeals said it saw no evidence of Lake’s claims, and in March, Arizona’s Supreme Court declined to hear her appeals because it said there was no evidence to support her claim of fraud.
Lake said she wasn’t shocked by the result, and “it will not deter me, not at all.”
“We went through the legal system and we did not get the verdict that we wanted,” she said at a press conference Tuesday.
Lake, a former TV news anchor for Fox 10 in Phoenix who’s been floated as a potential U.S. Senate candidate next year, said she would appeal the case and her team was looking at “several paths” forward. She said she would consider a Senate campaign but didn’t announce a run. “U.S. Senate? Well, not today,” she said.
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For now, Lake said she plans to continue to challenge the results.
“We are going to continue to fight our court case,” she said. “We’re not stopping here, we’re not stopping with one judge in Mesa who’s ruled against us time and time again.”
Maricopa County filed a motion to sanction Lake on Tuesday. In the filing, attorneys for the county said “Lake and her counsel engaged in a program of intentional and repeated fallacious misstatements of fact to mislead this Court.” Her lawyers were sanctioned earlier this month and ordered to pay $2,000.
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Lake made election denialism a central plank of her 2022 campaign and was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Although she claimed her loss was due to fraud, a study of cast vote data in Maricopa County found Lake lost more than 40,000 voters who didn’t vote for her but voted for other Republican candidates down ballot. The results were in line with several other statewide races in Arizona since 2018, as Republican candidates aligned with Trump have lost to Democratic candidates who campaigned as moderates in the closely split battleground state.
Last year, Lake launched the Save Arizona Fund to raise money for her election challenges and she’s continued to campaign, holding rallies including one scheduled for next week with former Trump acting director of ICE Tom Homan.
