An Arizona judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by Kari Lake over her loss in last year’s gubernatorial race, ruling that she had failed to prove that the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, had been forgotten to review voters’ signatures on mail ballot envelopes. .
The decision, issued late Monday, is the latest legal setback for Ms. Lake, a Republican who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump in one of the nation’s most high-profile 2022 gubernatorial races.
During a three-day trial in state superior court in Maricopa County last week, lawyers for Ms. Lake argued that poll workers worked too quickly to properly review the 300,000 signatures that accompanied the mail-in ballots.
But in a six page decisionJudge Peter A. Thompson wrote that the process complied with state law, which requires signatures to be compared to those in public voter files, but does not include specific guidelines for how much time a worker must spend on each ballot.
“Plaintiff’s evidence and arguments do not clear the cutoff,” he wrote, adding, “Not one second, not three seconds, not six seconds — no standard appears in the plain text of the statute.”
At a press conference Tuesday in Arizona, Ms. Lake said he would appeal the sentence and that his lawyers were exploring various avenues.
“We can no longer trust the buffoons running our elections in Maricopa County,” he said, then added, “You haven’t seen the last of our case.”
The case was the latest in a string of court losses during the election for Ms Lake, who has claimed, without evidence, that postal voting compromises the integrity of elections. Other claims in his lawsuit had previously been rejected by the court.
Ms Lake has suggested she might run for office again. This year, he said he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent.
Clint L. Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which helps oversee elections in the county, praised the judge’s decision in a statement Monday.
“Wild claims of rigged elections may generate media attention and fundraising appeals, but they don’t win court cases,” he wrote. “When ‘bombs’ and ‘smoking guns’ are not supported by facts, they fail in court.”
