The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected most of unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s latest attempt to overturn the results of the state’s 2022 election.
In his opinion, Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said that six of her seven claims had been properly dismissed by lower courts.
“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues, most of which were the subject of evidentiary proceedings in the trial court, and Petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law,” he wrote.
But he said that the last remaining claim had been improperly dismissed by those courts, as they had interpreted her challenge as protesting Maricopa County’s signature verification process itself, and not how it was used in the 2022 election. Concluding that it was the former, the lower courts had said she’d have needed to lodge that complaint before she lost the election.
Lake claims that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who’s become a primary antagonist in her stolen election narrative, accepted “a material number” of ballot envelopes bearing signatures that didn’t match those in the voters’ files.
So the high court is sending that one claim back down to Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson, who heard the case last year. Lake’s lawsuit has since traveled through an appeals court up to the state Supreme Court.
Quoting the appeals court opinion, Brutinel said that Lake must now prove that “votes [were] affected ‘in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election’ based on a ‘competent mathematical basis to conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.’”
Lake held a “prayer rally” with her supporters earlier this week, urging the state Supreme Court to hear her appeal.
“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” she tweeted early Thursday morning, part of a flurry of posts claiming the Supreme Court’s decision as a victory to be celebrated. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”
