Source: The Washington Post / Getty
An Arizona judge dismissed eight out of ten allegations made by failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who filed a lawsuit alleging that election fraud caused her to lose to Governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D). And Yet, Lake is out here celebrating the “victory” on Twitter like eight-tenths of her lawsuit didn’t get tossed out faster than Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Thanksgiving leftovers.
“BREAKING: Our Election Case is going to trial. Katie Hobbs attempt to have our case thrown out FAILED,” Late tweeted. “She will have to take the stand & testify. Buckle up, America. This is far from over.”
Again, she tweeted this like the judge didn’t grant her two halves of a slice from the extra-large political litigation pizza she ordered.
From The Hill:
Lake had asked the judge to set aside Hobbs’s certified victory based on 10 counts, alleging election officials in Maricopa County — which comprises most of the state’s population — committed misconduct and tabulated hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson on Monday evening dismissed eight of the 10 counts, ruling that they did not fall under the proper criteria to bring election challenges under Arizona law, even if true, so they did not merit further consideration.
But Thompson allowed a trial to move forward on two other counts that he said, if proven, could state a claim under the statute governing election challenges: alleged intentional interference by election officials affecting Maricopa County ballot printers and chain of custody violations.
So, what are the two allegations Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” understudy has to prove in order to make a case for election fraud?
According to the Hill, some of Maricopa County’s Election Day voter centers experienced printer malfunctions. Lake is claiming those printers were intentionally sabotaged by election officials, muck like Trump and his legal team claimed officials rigged voting machines to abracadabra Trump votes to Biden votes. (And we all know how that turned out.)
“Plaintiff must show at trial that the [Election Day] printer malfunctions were intentional, and directed to affect the results of the election and that such actions did actually affect the outcome,” Judge Thompson ruled.
Secondly, Lake’s legal team has to prove that more than 300,000 Maricopa County ballots did not include the proper chain of custody paperwork. The Hill reported that the “county disputes that claim, arguing that Lake does not understand the various forms of paperwork and indicating Maricopa has all necessary documentation on file.”
In other words, Kari Lake’s claims are invalid on account of she doesn’t know WTF she’s talking about.
“If there’s anything rotten in Arizona, it is what this contest represents,” an attorney for Hobbs said at the hearing. “For the past several years, our democracy and its basic guiding principles have been under sustained assault from candidates who just cannot or will not accept the fact that they lost. The judiciary has served as a bulwark against these efforts to undo our democratic system from within.”
And that’s just it: All Kari Lake appears to be doing is reading from the Trump Voter-Dump playbook of throwing baseless claims at the wall and hoping some of them stick. And if a judge finds that even a minuscule fraction of her claims are plausible enough to go to trial, she gets to pretend she’s been vindicated.
Or, whatever, maybe she’ll prove that she and Trump were right all along and democratic Inspector Gadget variants have been invading polling places and screwing with the machines. You never know.
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