On Thursday (February 16), a state court rejected former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s legal challenge, disputing her loss to Arizona’s Governor Katie Hobbs (D) in the midterm elections.
A Judge found in the ruling that there was no evidence supporting Lake’s claims she won the midterms.
The ruling is the second one rejecting Lake’s assertions that she was victorious.
In the opinion rejecting Lake’s claims, the judge wrote that the legal challenge “highlight Election Day difficulties” but asserted the “evidence” supports the superior court’s conclusion that voters could cast their ballots and that votes were properly tallied during the midterm election.
Lake lost her gubernatorial bid by a little over 17,000 votes. In the aftermath of the narrow defeat, Lake argued that ballot printing problems on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct, robbing her of a victory.
Yet the court asserted that the former gubernatorial candidate hadn’t proved voters who couldn’t have their ballots read by the tabulation machines at the polling places experiencing the problems couldn’t vote.
The court also highlighted that one of Lake’s own expert witnesses had admitted that voters whose ballots were unable to be read by the tabulation machines could still physically their ballots.
The opinion added that the cybersecurity expert had explained that ballots unable to be tabulated by the machines could still be submitted “through secure ‘Door 3.'”
Following the release of the opinion, Lake took to Twitter to reveal her intentions to take her appeal to the Supreme Court.
