The Arizona Supreme Court declined to hear the majority of Kari Lake‘s appeal of the 2022 governor’s race, in which she lost to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ), but it revived a claim that a trial court had dismissed.
The state’s high court sent a claim challenging the application of signature verification procedures for early voting ballots back to a trial court for review. However, most of her challenge to the race’s outcome, for which an appeals court said she did not have enough evidence to overturn in February, was thrown out by the Supreme Court.
KARI LAKE FIRES SHOTS AT DESANTIS: ‘THIS IS PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TURN’
The former gubernatorial candidate took her small win, saying she was thrilled with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The signature verification process in Maricopa County is a house of cards,” Lake said in a statement. “Thanks to this ruling, my team will get the chance to topple it.”
Lake, a MAGA Republican who was one of several candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump who lost their campaigns, has claimed, without proof, that Hobbs’s win was the result of widespread election fraud and that her race had been rigged from the beginning. She lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes.
While most election deniers conceded their races after losing in November during the midterm elections, Lake did not.
Lake began her quest to overturn the election swiftly after the results were announced. Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson originally tossed out her lawsuit, causing her to appeal her case to the Supreme Court. Thompson determined that Lake lacked “clear or convincing evidence” of intentional misconduct.
She focused primarily on ballot printers having problems at some polling places in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of Arizona’s voters. Defective printers had produced ballots that were too faint to read by on-site tabulators, causing severe backups in lines across the county.
However, Maricopa County officials frequently updated their voters and said in the aftermath that every voter had a chance to cast a ballot.
In the appeals court, the judge noted that while a witness called to testify on Lake’s behalf confirmed the weakly printed ballots, their conclusion that the ineffective ballots disenfranchised voters was baseless.
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Lake vowed to take her case to the Supreme Court in mid-February.
“I told you we would take this case all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court, and that’s exactly what we are going to do,” she tweeted after the appeals ruling was handed down. “Buckle up, America!”
