Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has managed to beat a state-imposed deadline to challenge the results of her race against Democrat Katie Hobbs.
“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” she wrote on Twitter in a post containing a photo of a lawsuit that appears to have been filed in Maricopa County. “Stay tuned, folks.”
Lake filed the lawsuit only minutes ahead of the Friday deadline, as reported by ABC News’ Garrett Archer.
Oh. It looks like Lake may have exactly 2 minutes to file her post-election lawsuit. https://t.co/VognNEA4UO
— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) December 9, 2022
At the center of the lawsuit is the allegation that “Thousands of voters, disproportionately Republican, gave up voting due to the long wait lines or simply avoided the polls after seeing the chaos reported in the news.”
“The expert evidence [provided by pollster Richard Baris] shows conservatively that at least between 15,603 and 29,257 Republican voters were disenfranchised from voting as a direct consequence of the voting machine failures in Maricopa,” the lawsuit stated. This would hypothetically fall into the range necessary to overturn the election results.”
According to Arizona election officials, Hobbs, the Secretary of State, was declared the winner by some 17,000 votes.
“The official election results certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the marquee race at the top of the ballot, a contest for the governorship between Hobbs herself and Kari Lake, showed a difference in votes between the two candidates of approximately 0.67% (17,117 votes out of about 2,559,485 cast),” the lawsuit points out. “The separation of votes between Hobbs and Lake is far narrower than the number of presumptively illegal and illegally cast ballots in Arizona.”
The “illegally cast ballots,” as the lawsuit argues, refers to those lacking a clear chain of custody, which is a felony offense in Arizona elections.
“Testimony by whistleblowers and witnesses with first-hand knowledge shows that Maricopa County officials violated Arizona chain of custody laws for hundreds of thousands of these mail-in ballots,” the suit states. “These chain of custody laws are a critical deterrent to keep illegal mail-in votes from infecting the election. With no chain of custody, there is no way to tell whether over 300,000 ballots cast in Maricopa County are legal ballots.”
“Maricopa County also permitted the counting of tens of thousands of mail-in and drop box ballots that did not satisfy signature verification requirements,” the lawsuit continued.