Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s attempt to reverse vote results by election denier
Kanishka Sharma
(Reuters) – Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake was rejected by a judge Saturday for trying to overturn her loss in the governor race.
Peter Thompson, Superior Court Judge filed the order on Saturday.
Lake was the most prominent Republican candidate in the midterm elections to support former Republican President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter corruption in 2020.
Lake sued Arizona election officials earlier in the month to challenge the counting and certification for the November electoral contest. Lake also requested to be declared winner despite no evidence of voter fraud.
Her lawsuit was against Lake’s Democratic rival, Governor-elect Katie Hobbs. Hobbs is currently Arizona secretary of state and also targets top officials in Maricopa County.
Trump-backed Lake lost the governor’s election to Hobbs in November. However, she refused to concede and kept making unconfirmed claims on Twitter about election irregularities.
Saturday’s order confirmed Hobbs’ election and stated that it had not found any “clear, convincing” evidence of misconduct that could have affected the election outcome.
Lake tweeted Saturday that she would appeal against the decision.
The order’s findings were in line with the judgments against Abe Hamadeh (the unsuccessful Republican candidate for attorney general) and Mark Finchem (secretary of state), who also challenged their losses.
Lake sued the state court asking it to declare her winner of the governor’s election or to throw out all results and force Maricopa County into a new election. The lawsuit claimed that thousands of illegal ballots were infected in Maricopa, which is the state’s most populous.
Lake was a former news anchor on television and one of several Trump-aligned Republican candidates to lose battleground state elections in the midterm election.
Lake promised to ban mail-in voting. The state’s mail voting was a method of voting that hundreds of thousands of Americans use.
(Reporting from Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing and transcription by Diane Craft