Kari Lake takes election challenge to AZ Supreme Court

FPI / March 3, 2023

Arizona Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to review her election contest case after it was dismissed by the Maricopa County Superior Court and Arizona Court of Appeals.

“The undisputed facts, and the violations of law, show that Maricopa’s 2022 election must be set aside,” Lake’s lawyers wrote in the petition to the state Supreme Court. “Trust must be restored. This Court should grant review to correct this manifest error.”

Democrat Katie Hobbs was declared the winner over Lake by about 17,000 votes.

In the petition to the state Supreme Court, Lake’s lawyers noted that the appeals court ignored Maricopa County’s violation of chain of custody requirements for ballots, which they said facilitated the injection of tens of thousands of illegal ballots in the November 2022 results.

“Allowing Maricopa to mask Runbeck’s unaccounted-for injection of 35,563 ballots underscores how the Opinion, if not vacated, will nullify (chain of custody) requirements and ratify the insertion of illegal votes into elections,” Lake's lawyers argue.

Runbeck Election Services, which performed ballot sorting for Maricopa in the 2022 midterms, recorded 263,379 ballots received from Maricopa — but then sent back 298,942 scanned ballots, Lake's legal team points out, noting that 35,563 ballots were magically added to the total number of ballots being processed by Runbeck after all the ballots had been counted.

Other points made in the filing by Lake's lawyers:

• Maricopa County didn’t perform the required testing of voting machines before Election Day.

• Election officials in Maricopa admitted in court that they didn’t count the number of drop-box ballots before sending them to Runbeck Services for processing, which Lake's lawyers say is illegal.

• Maricopa County election officials failed to perform mandatory Logic & Accuracy testing on the voting machines. The machines failed to work in most GOP-dominated precincts on Election Day.

Lake also wants the Supreme Court to rule that the trial and appeals courts were wrong to dismiss claims that Maricopa County intentionally targeted Republican voters on Election Day when printer malfunctions caused massive issues at the polls.

“Targeting voters — by race or by left-handedness — clearly is actionable,” Lake’s lawyers wrote. “Targeting Republicans is no different.”

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