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Trump-backed Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has yet to concede her race to Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs, is taking legal action following reports of major problems at several polling stations throughout the state’s largest county on Election Day.
Attorneys for Lake have filed suit against Maricopa County election officials in order to obtain records regarding the recently concluded election, in which some media outlets have declared Hobbs, Arizon’s secretary of state and the principal election official, the winner.
Hobbs reportedly leads Lake by around 17,000 votes, according to The Associate Press, which has called the race on her behalf.
The suit states:
Plaintiff desires that every lawful vote be properly counted and every voter who was eligible to vote be allowed to vote. Unfortunately, due to Defendants’ failures, many eligible voters may not have been able to vote. Because Defendants were unable or unwilling to conduct a reconciliation of voter check ins against ballots cast of each polling center on election night in accordance with Arizona law and have now unlawfully refused to produce public records in response to two public records requests regarding how they administered the election, Plaintiff cannot determine that every lawful vote will be properly counted. The records Plaintiff requested in response to the numerous issues with Defendants’administration of the election are consistent with a parallel demand by the Arizona Attorney General for answers to questions about the Defendants’ actions.
The lawsuit names Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer as well as other officials. The suit was filed in Arizona Superior Court and seeks the quick release of key information regarding how the elections were administered, “which featured widespread issues in the state’s largest county,” The Epoch Times reported.
“Given instances of misprinted ballots, the commingling of counted and uncounted ballots, and long lines discouraging people from voting, as demonstrated in the attached declarations, these records are necessary for Plaintiff to determine the full extent of the problems identified and their impacts on electors,” the 19-page lawsuit noted.
“We need information from Maricopa County,” Lake told Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast earlier this week.
“They ran the shoddiest election ever, in history, and we want some information. We’re on a timeline, a very strict timeline when it comes to fighting this botched election. And they’re dragging their feet. They don’t want to give us the information, so we’re asking the courts to force them to give us the information,” she noted further.
According to The Epoch Times:
Maricopa County officials have acknowledged that tabulators across many polling sites stopped working properly on election day. Among the advised solutions was voters placing their ballots into a box to be counted later. Declarations attached to the new suit from poll observers say that workers mixed counted and uncounted ballots in the same container at the end of the night.
Another solution to the tabulator problem was a voter checking out of a site and utilizing a mail-in ballot. To try to figure out the extent of the problems, the Lake campaign on Nov. 15 requested information such as all records related to voters who checked into a site and who also submitted a ballot by mail. The campaign sent another request on Nov. 16. None of the records have been produced yet, which violates Arizona law that public record requests must be fulfilled “promptly,” the suit states.
Lake isn’t the only GOP candidate in the last election who has filed legal action.
Republican National Committee and Arizona GOP Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh on Tuesday alleged “a host of errors and inaccuracies” by Arizona officials that impeded and hampered voting.
Arizonans demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials. I will not stop fighting until ALL voters receive justice.
See you in court. pic.twitter.com/5jJ6WWt8IK
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) November 23, 2022
According to the Daily Wire, Maricopa County, one of the country’s most populous, experienced “notable problems during the November 8 election, including printer and tabulation machine-related issues in at least 70 of the county’s 223 polling locations.”
“Arizonans demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials. I will not stop fighting until ALL voters receive justice. See you in court,” Hamadeh noted on Twitter in announcing the lawsuit.
Just the News reported that 11 attorneys visited 115 out of 223 vote centers in Maricopa County on Election Day, and of them, 72 “had material problems with the tabulators not being able to tabulate ballots.”
