Appeals court rejects Kari Lake’s 'unsupported bare assertions' of fraud in 2022 election loss

12 June 2024

Nearly two years after losing the Arizona gubernatorial election, former TV news anchor Kari Lake has still not accepted defeat. And on Wednesday, an Arizona appeals court shot down her latest bid to overturn election results.

Lake — who lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by roughly 17,000 votes statewide in 2022 — maintains that she would have won the gubernatorial race if it weren't for alleged fraud in the counting of ballots in Maricopa County, which is the most populous in the Grand Canyon State. However, according to the Arizona Mirror, presiding Judge Sean Brearcliffe, in writing the opinion for Arizona's Division 2 Court of Appeals, said Lake's claims were spurious and didn't hold up under scrutiny.

"We noted that Lake had ‘presented no evidence that voters whose ballots were unreadable by on-site tabulators were not able to vote,’ and only ‘sheer speculation’ that issues on election day discouraged ‘a substantial number of predominantly Lake voters’ from voting," Brearcliffe wrote, adding that the GOP candidate's "allegation[s] of fraud leap[ed] over a substantial gap in the evidence presented."

Previously, Lake's lawyers called an expert witness who alleged that roughly 16% of the Maricopa County population had been disenfranchised due to supposed issues with ballot printers and vote tabulators, though that witness reportedly based his argument on exit polling data as opposed to any hard evidence.

In siding with trial court Judge Peter Thompson over Lake, Brearcliffe also cast doubt on the Republican candidate's claims that roughly 8,000 ballots in Maricopa County weren't properly counted. He wrote that Lake attempted to "leap a gap in proof with unsupported bare assertions."

“What Lake needed to do at trial was provide competent evidence that the ballots did not match the canvass in numbers that could have resulted in her election day victory,” Judge Brearcliffe wrote in his opinion. “She failed to do so.”

This loss is just the latest of many not just for Lake herself, but also for her legal team. Earlier this week, the Arizona Mirror reported that attorney Bryan Blehm had his law license suspended for 60 days after he lied to the Arizona Supreme Court. Blehm argued before the state's highest court that it was an "undisputed fact" that 35,000 illegal ballots in Maricopa County were added to the final total, even though that claim was untrue.

Despite losing the 2022 gubernatorial election, Lake has managed to emerge as the presumptive Republican nominee in Arizona's U.S. Senate race. And in addition to denying her own 2022 election loss, Lake also continues to baselessly argue that former President Donald Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election.

Last week, Lake gave a speech at a store selling pro-Trump merchandise insisting that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump, and that Democrats "stole our government" in reference to Hobbs' win in the 2022 gubernatorial election. Lake delivered that speech in front of another symbol of a losing endeavor: The Confederate battle flag.

Click here to read the Mirror's report in full.

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