Photo by Jim Small | Arizona Mirror
It’s finally over.
After two years filled with losses and appeals, the Arizona Supreme Court has denied Kari Lake’s final petition in a court case aimed at overturning the results of the 2022 race for governor.
The high court’s decision, made behind closed doors without public comment, came one day after the Nov. 5 election. Lake ran in that election as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, even though she never conceded her loss in the 2022 race for Arizona governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
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Lake, who is trailing Democratic opponent Ruben Gallego in the Senate race, made a name for herself as a purveyor of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, who endorsed her in 2022 and 2024. After the former Phoenix television news anchor lost the governor’s race by more than 17,000 votes, she claimed that the governorship had been stolen from her, just like the presidency had been stolen from Trump.
“The 2022 election was irredeemably flawed,” Jennifer Wright, one of Lake’s attorneys, wrote in the final appeal. “Without this Court’s intervention, future elections remain threatened.”
But Wright rehashed many of the same arguments that had already failed during Lake’s previous trials and appeals, instead of contesting the lower court judges’ mistakes in interpreting and applying the law, the function of appellate courts.
Tom Liddy, an attorney for Maricopa County, filed a scathing response to Lake’s last appeal on Aug. 12.
“Rather than offering reasons why review should be granted, the Petition instead only argues that Lake is right and the lower courts are wrong,” Liddy wrote.“The Petition makes this argument by simply parroting Lake’s position below while ignoring much of the legal reasoning and all of the evidence that led the lower courts to decide against her.”
In the appeal, Wright argued that Maricopa County didn’t conduct the logic and accuracy tests on its ballot tabulators that are required by law, and that the people comparing voter signatures on early and mail-in ballot envelopes approved them too quickly to have actually completed any true signature verification.
But the case law on which Lake based her argument meant that her attorneys would have to prove that the county failed to perform any signatures verification at all.
Liddy pointed out that, during her second trial, when the court concluded that two of Lake’s own witnesses testified that they had personally verified signatures for the county. He added that Lake’s signature verification claims didn’t fail at trial because the lower court misinterpreted the law, but because of her attorneys’ incompetence.
“Lake’s signature verification claim failed because her allegations wrote a cheque (sic) that her proof could not cash,” Liddy wrote. “Lake’s failure in providing competent evidence to support her claim is no reason to grant review.”
Liddy countered Lake’s allegations that the county didn’t perform logic and accuracy testing on its tabulators ahead of the 2022 election, pointing out that the court record in the case contains certificates signed by the secretary of state, as well as Republican and Democrat observers who witnessed the tests being completed.
Liddy also addressed Lake’s allegations that the county performed additional “unannounced testing” of the tabulators. He said that supposed testing, caught on publicly-viewable cameras, was actually just the installation of memory cards that contained the elections program that had already undergone logic and accuracy testing.
“Lake also complains of the error codes returned in the subsequent testing of the tabulators with the installed memory cards, but Lake willfully ignores the evidence showing that Maricopa County intentionally ran test ballots that would return these errors to ensure that the tabulators were reading such ballots appropriately,” Liddy wrote.
According to Phoenix attorney and Lake critic Tom Ryan, the Arizona Supreme Court’s denial of this appeal is the end of the road for Lake’s long-enduring challenge to the results of the 2022 election.
“To paraphrase a quote from Charles Dickens in his 1843 short story ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Kari Lake’s case is as dead as a doornail,” Ryan told the Arizona Mirror, via email. “Or to paraphrase Monty Python in their Dead Parrot skit, Kari Lake’s case is bereft of life, joined the Choir Eternal, kicked the bucket, bought the farm, is without any observable metabolic processes, and is not pining for the fjords of Norway. It is dead.”
Lake filed her initial election challenge in Maricopa County Superior Court Dec. 9, 2022. She lost that trial, appealed the decision, and was granted a new trial on only one of the several claims considered during the first trial.
She lost her second trial in May 2023 and has been laboring to convince the appeals courts, or the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse that decision ever since.
Lake and the attorneys that represented her in both trials have all faced repercussions for their false allegations of election fraud.
Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm and Washington, D.C., employment attorney Kurt Olsen were both sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court in May 2023 for making false claims in one of Lake’s appeals. The attorneys wrote that it was an “undisputed fact” that more than 35,000 ballots were illegally inserted into batches of legal ballots in Maricopa County when the November 2022 ballots were being sorted shortly after Election Day, but the high court determined that was not true.
In June, a Supreme Court Panel ruled to suspend Blehm’s law license for 60 days as discipline for his false statements, and in October the panel formally admonished Olsen for the same reason.
The judges on the panel explained in Olsen’s disciplinary ruling that he was granted leniency because he willingly participated in the disciplinary hearing and because he promised to be more careful with his wording in the future.
Blehm skipped his disciplinary hearing, without first informing the court, and did not cooperate in the proceedings.
Lake herself is the subject of a defamation lawsuit for the election fraud lies she spread about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer after she lost the 2022 election.
The case is currently in the discovery phase, after in April Lake legally conceded that her statements were false. She later claimed publicly that she never lied and that she only gave up defending herself in the defamation case because it was just a distraction tactic to interfere with her campaign for the Senate.
The amount of damages that Lake and her campaign owe Richer for security costs, loss to his reputation and mental health issues caused by her statements, as well as punitive damages, will be determined in a jury trial, with a pretrial hearing set for February.
Neither Olsen nor Wright responded to a request for comment early Thursday evening.
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