Lake sues after losing bid in Ariz. governor’s race
Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, filed a lawsuit Friday contesting the results of an election that was certified by the state this week.
Lake’s lawsuit came after she had spent weeks making a series of public statements and social media posts aimed at sowing doubt in the outcome of a contest she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. That loss was certified in documents signed Monday by Hobbs, who currently serves as secretary of state.
A former news anchor, Lake centered her candidacy on false conspiratorial claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump, who had endorsed her. For the past month, Lake, her campaign and other allies have been soliciting Election Day accounts from voters on social media and at rallies.
“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Lake said on Twitter on Friday evening after announcing her lawsuit. “Stay tuned, folks.”
Hobbs called Lake’s suit “baseless” in a post of her own on Twitter, describing it as the “latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.”
Lake sued Hobbs as well as officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county.
The suit claims that the election was corrupted in Maricopa County and that she should be declared the winner. The 70-page filing relies on a hodgepodge of allegations, ranging from voter and poll worker accounts to poll numbers claiming that voters agreed with Lake on the election’s mismanagement. Some of what is cited comes not from last month’s election but from the 2020 contest. Other allegations accuse officials of wrongdoing for taking part in efforts to try to tamp down election misinformation.
Fields Moseley, a spokesperson for Maricopa County, said the court system was the proper place for campaigns to make their case to challenge results.
Lake’s legal action came as lawsuits were also filed Friday by two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections: Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney general candidate.