Kari Lake continues legal bid to toss election results

PHOENIX — The state Court of Appeals will consider later this month whether to expedite a bid by Kari Lake to overturn the results of the gubernatorial election she lost by more than 17,000 votes.

A three-judge panel has set Jan. 24 to consider her “special action” request. And they want a response from attorneys for now-Gov. Katie Hobbs by Wednesday, Jan. 11.

But that doesn’t mean the judges will give Lake’s attorneys the chance to argue to them directly on that date why she believes they should order what she calls “a new and fair election.”

If not, that leaves her to pursue a standard appeal. But the court wouldn’t hear that until at least March.

Lake, however, already is pushing ahead with an alternate plan. She is asking the Arizona Supreme Court to immediately intercede, bypassing the appellate court entirely, and decide whether Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson erred in rejecting her claims that there was misconduct in how the election was conducted.

There has been no action yet by the high court on that petition.

Her appeal consists largely of the same charges she made to Thompson that problems with printers on Election Day in Maricopa County depressed the votes of Republicans, people who Lake says would have voted for her. And she contends there is evidence that the problems that kept on-site tabulators from reading those ballots were the result of intentional misconduct by county election officials.

Lake also argues that the county violated state laws dealing with chain-of-custody requirements of ballots.

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Thompson last month issued a detailed finding on how all the testimony on behalf of the GOP gubernatorial hopeful provided no evidence to back her claim that she should have been declared the winner. And he said some of her theories about what went wrong and why, particularly with those ballot printers, simply were not backed by facts.

In her appeal, Lake contends that the judge applied the wrong legal standards in reaching his conclusions.

She separately charges that Maricopa County counted early ballots that had signatures on the envelopes that did not match the voter’s registration file.

County officials said they did do a signature comparison, though they also used other documents they had on file, like a voter’s request for an early ballot. And that, they said, complied with what is allowed in the Election Procedures Manual.

Thompson refused to allow her to even present evidence on this charge. He said the EPM and its procedures have been in place since 2019 and if Lake believed what is allowed there is not legal she should have filed that challenge before the election.

Lake told the Supreme Court justices there is good reason for them to immediately take the case, citing a new governor seated “under a cloud of electoral uncertainty and impropriety.’’

“This action requires this court’s speedy, final resolution, without resort to an intermediate decision by the Court of Appeals,” her attorneys wrote.