After three court cases denied Kari Lake’s claim that the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election was stolen from her, the Arizona Supreme Court then chose to not even hear her bogus claim. Ten months after the 2022 election, Lake still has not conceded, and in fact the former TV news anchor, possible 2024 Arizona Senate candidate, or perhaps even trump’s VP pick, is appealing her election loss again.
This time she says the problem with Maricopa County election machines, which was one of her go-to arguments in the previous appeals, was not simply an error—no, she claims County officials “engineered the Election Day chaos” to elect Katie Hobbs Governor by more than 17,000 votes.
Nowhere does Lake explain why the Maricopa County’s Election Department, which is chaired by a Republican and Republicans hold the majority of seats, would rig the race for a Democrat. Republican commissioners even said they supported Lake and voted for her, but in Lake’s conspiratorial universe Republican officials plotted to steal the election for the Democrat Hobbs.
Instead of making assertions that Maricopa County ran the election incompetently, or that some unnamed bad actors within the system injected illegal ballots, Lake took the claims a step further, accusing the county as a whole of engineering and planning what her lawyers described as “chaos” on Election Day 2022.
Lake’s current appeal regurgitates an argument her team made in previous cases—that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were screened for signature verification faster than humanly possible. Election officials successfully rebutted that claim in previous court cases, but tomorrow Lake’s lawyers will argue before the Arizona Court of Appeals that they should have access to more than 1.3 million ballot envelopes filed in Maricopa County during the 2022 election.
Specifically, they want to review the green envelopes that include a voter's signature, address and, if the voter includes it, a phone number.
Lake and Bryan Blehm, her attorney, argue the envelopes are a public record. The county contends they are not, and that a ruling allowing the envelopes to be made public risks identity fraud and infringing on privacy that could have a chilling effect on voters.
And what exactly could they determine, looking at an envelope but lacking voter profiles? Nothing, because they’re not after proof, never been. No, they’re all about doxxing and creating fear—juries, witnesses, elected officials, and now voters. Well, Kari Lake, just fuck off already. You have no right to my ballot or that of any other Arizonan who was assured their vote was secure and secret.
If Lake’s ten-month denial train has taught Arizonans anything, it’s that we’re extremely lucky we did not elect a narcissistic fool who cannot accept reality, and who would not have vetoed, as Katie Hobbs has at a record pace, the racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-women, anti-education bills the GOP-controlled Legislature keeps sending Hobbs’s way.
UPDATE: The two-day trial to determine whether Lake’s team would have access to the 1.3 million ballot envelopes got underway today, Thursday. Immediately Judge Hannah ruled that two of Lake’s professional deniers would not be allowed to testify. These are people who appear at her events claiming fraud, but they have no actual experience with elections and their testimonies have already been debunked in previous court cases.
Hannah ruled they would not be allowed to testify, and he said Busch, who is a medical office manager, was so “obviously unqualified” he had to say so on the court record.
“She’s not even in the ballpark,” he said, prompting a whisper of “wow” from a group of about 10 people supporting Lake in the courtroom gallery.