Honorable Peter Thompson in Maricopa County Superior Court in Mesa during the Kari Lake trial on Dec. 21, 2022. || Maricopa County Superior Court
By Ray Stern || Arizona Republic
The first day of an evidence trial based on an election-challenge lawsuit by Republican governor candidate Kari Lake raised plentiful suspicions but did not reveal evidence of the misconduct she alleged.
Lake, a Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump, alleges in her suit that malicious acts by election officials caused “vast numbers of illegal votes” to infect the election and that Democrat Katie Hobbs was wrongfully declared the winner.
Election results showed that Hobbs beat Lake by about 17,000 votes in the Nov. 8 election. After basing her campaign on 2020 election conspiracy theories, Lake’s best chance of taking office now rests on convincing a judge she was robbed of a rightful victory.
Roughly seven hours of court proceedings on Wednesday made it clear how difficult that will be.
There’s no question that Maricopa County had some problems on Election Day: Printer malfunctions caused vote-counting machines to reject some ballots at up to one-third of polling locations, causing frustration and long lines but, according to county officials, no disenfranchised voters.
Lake’s two-day trial can only cover a couple of issues related to the problem, though. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson granted Lake the two-day trial based on two specific allegations in her lawsuit, toss in eight others.
The two that survived allege that an unknown county employee interfered illegally with the printers in a way that caused Lake to lose votes. Lake also alleged that an unknown number of ballots were added to the county’s total by employees of Runbeck Election Services, a Phoenix company that provides election equipment and services for the county, and that receipts of delivery were not maintained in violation of state law.
But Thompson’s ruling said that Lake must prove that the county’s printer malfunctions were intentionally manipulated to affect the election results and that the actions “did actually affect the outcome.”
