'Rank speculation': Lake's election lawsuit not built on facts, Hobbs tells court
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Kari Lake's claims that Arizona's gubernatorial election was rigged are built on "rank speculation" and "cynical mistrust" and should immediately be tossed out, a lawyer for Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs told the court.
Rather than rely on verifiable facts and empirical data, Lake is taking a haphazard, kitchen-sink approach that fails to demonstrate fraud and malfeasance necessary to overturn an election under Arizona law, Alexis Danneman said in a motion filed Thursday.
"Kari Lake lost the Governor’s race to Katie Hobbs by 17,117 votes," Danneman wrote. "In the face of this insurmountable margin, Lake brings a sprawling election contest, alleging everything from cyber hacking to Twitter mischief to intra-Republican warfare — all in an effort to sow distrust in Arizona’s election results."
Danneman told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson that Lake failed to meet the narrowly defined legal threshold to challenge the election: misconduct by elections officials, ineligibility of her opponent, bribery, or illegal or erroneously counted votes.
Lawyers for Maricopa County also asked the judge to dismiss Lake's lawsuit. In a separate motion Thursday, they said Lake's claims cannot withstand the barest of scrutiny and her lawsuit is based on speculation about what might have happened in the Nov. 8 election.
"It wholly lacks allegations about what actually happened with respect to the ballots cast by the 2,592,313Arizonans who participated in the election," lawyers with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office wrote on behalf of the Board of Supervisors and county election administrators.
"Not only do Plaintiff’s allegations fail to support finding that she is entitled to be awarded enough votes to change the outcome of the election, but also, they do not show even a single illegal vote, any erroneous count of votes, or that the Defendant election officials engaged in any misconduct," lawyers wrote.
Hobbs' and the county's motions to dismiss will be taken up by the judge at a hearing on Monday.
Lake on Dec. 9 sued Hobbs, members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett and Recorder Stephen Richer.
Lake asked the court to set aside her electoral loss and declare her the winner or, short of that, order a do-over of the gubernatorial election in Maricopa County. She maintains that printer problems at polling stations in the state's most populous county caused long lines and "chaos" on Election Day. She also claims "hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots" were cast in the election.
She also alleged that Hobbs, who is Arizona's secretary of state, orchestrated a scheme to silence political opponents by flagging Twitter accounts with misinformation months before she launched her campaign for governor. Lake's allegation touched off a misleading election theory.
Lake, a former television news anchor and first-time candidate for office, was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. She built her campaign on unproven allegations that the 2020 election was rigged in favor of President Joe Biden.
Months before the election, Lake claimed if she lost, it could only be a consequence of fraud. Her 70-page lawsuit includes allegations rooted in the 2020 election that have repeatedly been debunked or disproven, including problems with signature verification on ballots.
The county's motion notes that Lake's lawsuit includes 220 statements from voters who were purportedly harmed on Election Day due to the printer problems − but only three of them did not cast ballots.
"And none of those voters were prevented from casting a ballot by the Defendants, but instead each chosenot to vote because the declarant decided that waiting in line or visiting a different polling place was a greater inconvenience than the value they placed on voting that day," lawyers wrote.
The county and Hobbs are also objecting to Lake's plan to photograph and copy ballots as part of her election lawsuit, saying it is a violation of law.
The judge on Thursday gave permission for Lake to randomly inspect 50 ballots printed on Election Day from six county vote centers, 50 early ballots cast in the general election, and 50 so-called "spoiled" ballots that were discarded due to voter error.
But lawyers for Hobbs and the county said Lake's subsequent request to photograph them goes beyond the scope of what the judge allowed − and that it is against the law. Late Friday, the judge agreed and denied Lake's request.
However, Thompson granted Lake's request to include in the sample pool of ballots some ballots that were rejected by tabulation machines and instead deposited in a secure box, called box 3.
"Kari Lake now asks this Court to allow her to engage in a fishing expedition to search for a factual basis for her claims that appears nowhere in her complaint," Danneman said in her motion.
As her legal challenge to the election continues, Lake won a separate battle over campaign spending.
The Lake campaign raised an issue with the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission over some anti-Lake ads that aired during high-profile sporting events in February.
The ads, created by a group called Freedoms Future Fund, had accused Lake of being soft on border enforcement and not being supportive enough of Trump. The group paid $500,000 to air the ads from February through June, records show, a time when Lake was facing a crowded field of candidates for the Republican nomination for governor. The ads aired during the Olympics and the Phoenix Open golf tournament in February.
Lake’s camp argued the ads were political and subject to disclosure laws. Attorneys for Freedoms Future Fund maintained the ads were educational and did not express advocacy.
But under an agreement with the commission, Freedoms Future Fund agreed to pay a $45,000 fine and file the necessary campaign finance reports by the end of the year.
As part of the agreement, Freedoms Future Fund avowed that it didn’t receive any money from another gubernatorial candidate nor from their campaign committee.
Robert Anglen is an investigative reporter for The Republic. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. Follow him on Twitter @robertanglen.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake's election lawsuit not built on facts, Katie Hobbs says
