Kari Lake's Last Election Misconduct Hope

Kari Lake's last election-misconduct claim went to trial on Wednesday, with the defeated Republican candidate trying to prove that Maricopa County did not properly verify signatures on ballot envelopes during Arizona's latest gubernatorial election.

The three-day trial is on a single issue of Lake's wider election lawsuit—the only one that has survived several dismissals and rejections by Arizona judges and courts. Even on that single issue, she will "soon reach the end of the line," a leading expert in election law has told Newsweek.

After losing by more than 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs at the midterms race, Lake refused to concede and filed a lawsuit challenging the result. The Trump-endorsed candidate claimed that irregularities in Maricopa County—including the casting of thousands of illegal ballots—stopped her from winning.

Kari Lake
Defeated GOP candidate Kari Lake speaks to the media after voting on November 8, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. The former TV news anchor has challenged the result of the gubernatorial election. John Moore/Getty Images

Her case was first rejected by a judge in December and then by an appeals court, but Lake further appealed to have her case heard in court. In March, the Arizona Supreme Court dismissed almost all of her case, but ordered a trial court to conduct an additional review of the county's procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots.

Lake attorneys claim that the county was too hasty in its verification process and that employees did not check all signatures. They are not contesting whether voters' signatures on ballot envelopes matched those in their voting records, but they are challenging all levels of verification.

James A. Gardner told Newsweek that, without steeping in the details of the case, Lake's claims remain weak. Gardner is a law professor and an expert on election and constitutional law at the University at Buffalo School of Law of the State University of New York.

"To answer the questions you ask with any assurance would require a much greater steeping in the details of the case than I have had from this distance," Gardner said.

"That said, my sense is that the remaining claim that is going to trial is as weak as the ones that already got dismissed, and Lake has been able to take things this far only by relying on the procedural technicalities of legal pleading, not on the strength of any evidence that she will be able to produce. It looks to me like she will soon reach the end of the line."

According to Gardner, Lake's willingness to persist this far can be interpreted "not as flowing from any abiding commitment to the rule of law—she exudes disdain for the law—but as a way of signaling to Donald Trump and his supporters the depth and intensity of her loyalty."

He added: "That kind of a signaling would indeed be the coin of the realm in the kind of strongman authoritarian regimes that Trump is promising to impose if he is reelected. In an actual liberal democracy, it is a perversion of the norms of democratic citizenship."

Lake's attorney said the case was contesting whether any verification took place at all.

"This isn't a question of not doing it well enough, they're simply not doing signature verification," Kurt Olsen said. "Maricopa received a flood of 1.3 million ballots in the 2022 general election. [...] The evidence will show that the signatures were either not reviewed at all, or that the signature verifiers were simply clicking through the computer screen and moving on to the next ballot without doing any cross-reference to the record signature."

He then claimed that he could prove that the county did not follow the 11-step process for verifying signatures. Olsen, as well as Lake's other attorney, Bryan Blehm, previously worked on efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

County officials seem confident that procedure was followed. Tom Liddy, civil division chief for Maricopa County Attorney's Office, said Lake's witnesses supporting her claim were just a few of the 155 people who did first-review signature verification for the county. He said that the witnesses were actually a "marching band" for the county's case.

To win the case, Lake needs to prove with clear and convincing evidence that Maricopa County did not do any signature verification, as required by state law. She also needs to prove that this had a significant impact on the outcome of the case.

Kari Lake War Room, Lake's official campaign Twitter account, wrote that the lawsuit "has never been about Kari Lake."

"This election was stolen from the people. We have & will continue to prove it. This has never been about @KariLake. This is about exposing a broken system that's disenfranchising Arizonans. We will never let another election be run this way again," the account tweeted on Wednesday.

Uncommon Knowledge

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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

About the writer


Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek Reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. and European politics, global affairs ... Read more

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