Kali Lake speaks as former President Trump watches a rally in Florence, Arizona, in January 2022. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (modified) | flicker/CC BY-SA 2.0

Unsuccessful Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and her attorneys said through a lawsuit challenging the November 2022 election results that they “continue to defame and erode the foundations on which our great state stands. There is,” Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a filing with the Arizona Supreme Court this week. He asked the court to dismiss Lake’s legal challenge to reverse the election loss.

Republican Lake believes she is the true governor of Arizona, just as she believes it happened to former President Donald Trump in 2020, when Katie Hobbs won by over 17,000 votes in 2022. The 2008 election is claimed to have been stolen from her.

Election challenges for gubernatorial candidates First fired in December, after a two-day trial in which Maricopa County election officials failed to produce evidence to support her allegation that she had been wronged.After last month’s appeals supported the dismissalLake executed the following pledges take a case to the state supreme court.

On March 13, defendants in the lawsuit, Fontes, Hobbes, and Maricopa Counties, filed acrimonious responses to Lake’s petition asking the Supreme Court to review her campaign lawsuit. All three asked the High Court to dismiss Lake’s case.

Fontes and Hobbs went one step further and asked the court to sanction Lake and her attorneys, Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm and DC corporate employment attorney Kurt Olsen, for filing a lawsuit based on frivolous allegations. I asked.

Fontes attorney Craig Morgan wrote in his response to the Supreme Court: “We cannot allow a dissatisfied minority to weaponize the courts, sow unfounded mistrust in the electoral process, denigrate public officials, and undermine democracy. to try to overthrow the election.”

Since her first lawsuit, Lake has said she would have won the governorship had it not been for the deliberate suppression of Republican voters and rampant election fraud in Maricopa County. or called for new elections for the position.

However, Lake alleges that Maricopa County employees intentionally tampered with election day ballot printers to disenfranchise Republican voters, and that the county failed to adhere to a set of administrative rules for early voting. could not be persuaded by the first instance and appellate courts. Election Day has led to thousands of illegal votes being injected into the system.

In Maricopa County’s response to Lake’s request for the Supreme Court to rehear her case, county attorney Tom Liddy said that Lake “demonstrates the need for this court to rehear the Court of Appeals opinion. Unable to identify arguments. It does not identify a single new legal issue that this court needs to clarify.”

Attorney Abha Khanna, representing Hobbs, agreed with Liddy’s contention that Lake’s petition to the Supreme Court merely rehashed claims that the Court of Appeals and the High Court had already dismissed, and provided new evidence for those claims. He added that he would not introduce legal arguments.

All three defendants in this case sued Lake and her legal team for both misrepresenting evidence and presenting new allegations, which were generally disallowed in the appeal process.

In a Supreme Court petition, Lake’s attorneys, for the first time, received scan receipts showing 263,379 votes were delivered to the county’s election contractor, Lambeck Election Service, and received 298,942 votes from Lambeck to Maricopa. It indicated that it was returned to the county, claimed by a margin of 35,563 votes. What Lake claimed was illegally entered into a legal ballot.

Through these allegations, Khanna writes, Lake “blatantly misrepresents material facts in the record.”

In Lake’s first election challenge, the series of detention documents she ultimately cited in her Supreme Court petition did not exist.

“Now, Lake claims that not only do these records exist, but they show that an additional 35,563 votes were inserted in Lambeck and sent back to (Maricopa County Counting and Election Center) for counting. I will,” writes Khanna.

However, Lake included only a portion of the December trial exhibit (9 pages out of a total of 43) to prove these claims. Morgan wrote that these pages do not show all early ballots that have been posted and delivered to vote centers on Election Day. to Lambeck after the polls closed.

Some of those documents, Morgan said, recorded the receipt of ballots delivered after Election Day, which were considered late and were not counted by law.

He said that whether intentional or ignorant, this attempt to bring new arguments to the Supreme Court based on the mischaracterization of the evidence was inexcusable and warranted justifiable sanctions from the court. I wrote that it was

“MS. Lake and her attorneys continue to make false allegations of election fraud and are now appealing to the point of misrepresenting the records and the law,” Morgan wrote. , is our judicial authority’s last chance to remind those who seek it that they must do so in good faith. Those who seek harm will continue to defame and undermine the foundations upon which our great nation stands.”

post Hobbs, Fontes and Maricopa counties applauded Lake’s appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. arizona mirror.