(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The legal team of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has requested that the Arizona Supreme Court take up her Maricopa County election lawsuit, Human Events reported.
New: @KariLake has filed a petition to transfer the appeal to the AZ Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/f7aCmhTug0
— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) January 1, 2023
“Petitioner Kari Lake asks this Court to transfer special-action appellate review… from the Arizona Court of Appeals,” the petition begins.
According to the petition, Lake and her legal team requested the transfer for two reasons.
First, “the extraordinary circumstances of a targeted attack on Election-Day voters” in Maricopa County, along with the subsequently delayed trial.
Specifically, they argued that “election-day chaos targeted Republican voters,” and provided evidence in support of that fact.
Second, Lake and her team felt “the need to qualify this Court’s decisions” regarding ever-shifting evidence standards and the definition of electoral “misconduct.”
According to Lake’s lawyers, the District Court subjected her to moving goalposts in respect to the presentation of evidence, immediately dropping eight of Lake’s 10 submitted counts.
The judge also made clear that proving election failures and disenfranchisement of certain voting classes was not sufficient; Lake must instead definitively prove that Maricopa County voluntarily sabotaged the election.
Presumably, based upon the judge’s reasoning, if Maricopa County officials accidentally disenfranchised voters, no punishment would be required.
Lake’s case was largely dismissed despite the fact that her team proved by way of sworn testimony that chaos on election day caused “tabulators to reject tens of thousands of ballots,” that election officials openly violated “chain-of-custody requirements with respect [to] nearly 300,000 Election Day drop box ballots” and that officials “allowed tens of thousands of ballots with voters’ signatures which clearly did not match the record signatures.”
For those reasons, among others, Lake’s team asserted that “a significant majority of voters no longer trust the outcomes of elections in Arizona.”
As news regarding the appeal broke, alleged new-governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, was taking the oath of office.
With Hobbs sworn in, replacing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, pundits and political experts warned legal challenges to the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona will become increasingly difficult.
