PHOENIX — The Arizona Court of Appeals has agreed to expedite consideration of Kari Lake’s claims the 2022 election was flawed.
But that doesn’t mean the judges will give her what she wants: either to be installed as governor or to require a new election in the state’s most populous county.
In a brief order made public Tuesday, the appellate court accepted the losing Republican gubernatorial candidate’s request to have her election claims handled as a special action. As a result, attorneys for Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs have only until Jan. 17 to file their own legal papers about why the three-judge panel should reject her bid.
The judges also agreed to consider the matter on Feb. 1, at least a month earlier than the court would have heard a regular appeal.
Lake’s appeal is essentially a renewal of the claims she made to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson that she would have won — or, at least, would have had a better chance — had Maricopa County not had problems with its ballot-on-demand printers at many of its 223 voting centers. Many of those printers produced ballots that could not be read by the on-site ballot tabulators.
Lake contends this depressed the votes of Republicans, who are more likely to go to the polls on Election Day than Democrats. She argued there was evidence the printer problems were the result of intentional misconduct by one or more people — she had no names — working for the county.
Thompson, however, said Lake not only failed to prove any intentional act but also to provide evidence there was an effect on the outcome of the election, which Lake lost to Hobbs by 17,117 votes. He pointed out that those voters whose ballots could not be immediately read by the on-site tabulators had the option of putting them in a sealed box to be read later at the county election center.
County supervisors have since commissioned a study to find out why the ballot printers that worked during the August primary malfunctioned in November. They retained former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor to lead the effort.
No deadline has been given to complete that study. But whatever is found would have no legal effect on the election results.
In his ruling last month, Thompson also rejected another claim by Lake that the county failed to follow chain-of-custody rules for ballots and that somehow an extra 25,000 ballots were injected into the election system after the vote.
Lake also hopes to get the appellate court to consider one claim that Thompson did not even allow her to present: that signatures on envelopes containing early ballots did not match each voter’s registration file.
County officials said they did do a signature comparison, though they also used other documents they had on file, such as voters’ requests for early ballots. That complied with the Election Procedures Manual, they said.
Thompson said the manual and its procedures have been in place since 2019 and if Lake believed they allow something illegal, she should have filed that challenge before the election.
Lake had sought to bypass the appellate court entirely and take the case directly to the state Supreme Court.
The justices rejected that move. But whoever loses at the Court of Appeals is virtually certain to seek high court review.
In a speech to a crowd of young conservative activists in Phoenix Sunday, Dec. 18, 2022, Republican Kari Lake alleged again that her election loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs was illegitimate. She called Maricopa County a "house of cards" and said "we're going to burn it to the ground."
