Kari Lake’s case will proceed to trial after Maricopa County’s dismissal motion is denied by the judge.

Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake’s Election Challenge Goes to Trial

By Randy DeSoto, Patriot Project | May 16, 2023 at 7:38pm

Exciting news for those following the Arizona gubernatorial race! Republican candidate Kari Lake’s challenge of Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs’ win in the November 2022 election is going back to trial on Wednesday. Judge Peter Thompson has ordered the trial to proceed, rejecting Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss.

Are you ready for this? Lake certainly is! She tweeted Monday night, “We’re going to Court. Get ready!”

The Arizona Supreme Court remanded the issue of whether the mail-in ballot signature verification process“>signature verification process was followed in Maricopa County during the election back to the trial court in March.

By the official tally, Hobbs won the contest by approximately 17,000 votes, but Lake is questioning the legitimacy of tens of thousands of those ballots. This is a crucial moment for Lake’s campaign, and the outcome of this trial could have significant implications for the future of Arizona politics.

What’s at Stake?

On Friday, Thompson heard oral arguments in the case as he considered Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss. The county said in its court filing that Lake’s signature verification claim should be dismissed because her legal team “has not identified with specificity any ballots that should not have been counted.”

However, Lake’s attorney Kurt Olsen told Thompson on Friday that whistleblowers who worked in November’s election in Maricopa County revealed to his team that Level 1 reviewers were rejecting 25 to 40 percent of mail-in ballots for non-matching signatures. Olsen calculated that for the 1.3 million ballots cast in Maricopa, as many as 500,000 were rejected by Level 1 reviewers.

VoteBeat Arizona reporter Jen Fifield reported in March that in the 2022 general election, “workers marked 18,510 signatures as ‘non-matching,’ and of those, 15,411 voters confirmed it was their ballot, or ‘cured’ their ballot. That led to 3,099 rejected for bad or missing signatures. Of those, 1,299 were missing signatures and 1,800 were bad.”

Lake told “War Room” host Steve Bannon that her legal team met with three whistleblowers “who were intimately involved in the signature verification process in Maricopa County.” She asserted that thanks to this lax verification process, hundreds of thousands of bad ballots were injected into the system.

“We’re confident that the number of fraudulent ballots exceeds the 17,000 margin separating myself and Katie Hobbs in their count of the election,” Lake said.

County Recorder Stephen Richer defended Maricopa’s signature review process in the 2022 election, telling Fifield some improvements have been made since 2020. Richer told The New York Times in March that “since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”

He continued, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”

What’s Next?

This is a developing story, and we will keep you updated as the trial progresses. Stay tuned for more information on this critical moment in Arizona politics.

Key Takeaways:

• Republican candidate Kari Lake’s challenge of Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs’ win in the November 2022 election is going back to trial on Wednesday.
• Judge Peter Thompson has ordered the trial to proceed, rejecting Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss.
• Lake is questioning the legitimacy of tens of thousands of ballots, and the outcome of this trial could have significant implications for the future of Arizona politics.
• This is a developing story, and we will keep you updated as the trial progresses.