Kari Lake at a July 18, 2022, candidate forum in Peoria. || Photo by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
BY KIRA LERNER || Arizona Mirror
Republican candidates who claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have been nominated for governor in four critical swing states, raising concerns that if elected they could try to sway election results in 2024 and beyond.
In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state.
Kari Lake, a former news anchor, is a staunch supporter of Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election. The GOP nominee in Arizona is also endorsed by Trump and has suggested that she won’t accept the results of her upcoming election if she loses.
“If we don’t win, there’s some cheating going on. And we already know that,” she said just hours before polls closed on primary day.
After she won the race, she told reporters: “We out-voted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say.”
Lake said during an Arizona Republican debate in June that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.
In the same debate, she called the election corrupt and said — with no evidence — that 34,000 ballots “were counted two, three, and four times” in Arizona and that 200,000 ballots were trafficked by mules. “He lost the election, and shouldn’t be in the White House,” she said about Biden.
