PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022, has one last claim of election fraud. On Friday, state officials and the Democratic governor asked a judge to throw out the case.
Lake was one of the most outspoken Republican candidates last year when it came to supporting former President Donald Trump’s lies about the election, which she made the focus of her campaign. When they lost their races in November, most people who said they didn’t win did not admit it, but Lake did not.
Most of the former TV anchor’s case has been thrown out by the courts. A judge heard points on Friday about whether or not Lake’s last claim should be tried next week.
Lawyers for Arizona’s elected officials and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs say that Lake’s claim that the race was rigged is based on unproven rumours.
Lake’s lawyers say that there was a rush of mail-in votes in Maricopa County, where more than 60% of the state’s voters live when there weren’t enough workers to check the signatures on the ballots. Her lawyers say that in the end, the county accepted thousands of votes that workers had turned down because the signatures didn’t match.
The Arizona Supreme Court brought back her claim that questioned how signature-verification procedures were used, overturning a lower court’s ruling that she had waited too long to make that claim.
The state Supreme Court sent the claim back to the lower court to decide if there is another reason to throw it out or if Lake can show that enough votes were changed to change the result of the election, which she lost by more than 17,000 votes.
According to papers filed by her lawyers, Lake said that at least 164,000 illegal votes were counted. Three people who checked signatures said that 15% to 40% of the votes they looked at were rejected because the signatures didn’t match.
“The math doesn’t add up,” one of Lake’s lawyers, Kurt Olsen, said.
Opposing lawyers said that the workers’ guesses don’t amount to breaking the law or being unprofessional. They also questioned whether the three workers really knew how the votes they had marked would turn out in the end.
Abha Khanna, one of the lawyers for Hobbs, said that Lake’s claims have “nothing to do with reality.”