By Caitlin Sievers, for Arizona Mirror
It’s lastly over.
After two years crammed with losses and appeals, the Arizona Supreme Court docket has denied Kari Lake’s remaining petition in a court docket case geared toward overturning the outcomes of the 2022 race for governor.
The excessive court docket’s choice, made behind closed doorways with out public remark, got here in the future after the Nov. 5 election. Lake ran in that election because the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, regardless that she by no means conceded her loss within the 2022 race for Arizona governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Lake, who’s trailing Democratic opponent Ruben Gallego within the Senate race, made a reputation for herself as a purveyor of the Massive Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, who endorsed her in 2022 and 2024. After the previous Phoenix tv information anchor misplaced the governor’s race by greater than 17,000 votes, she claimed that the governorship had been stolen from her, identical to the presidency had been stolen from Trump.
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“The 2022 election was irredeemably flawed,” Jennifer Wright, considered one of Lake’s attorneys, wrote within the remaining enchantment. “Without this Court’s intervention, future elections remain threatened.”
However Wright rehashed lots of the identical arguments that had already failed throughout Lake’s earlier trials and appeals, as a substitute of contesting the decrease court docket judges’ errors in decoding and making use of the regulation, the perform of appellate courts.
Tom Liddy, an lawyer for Maricopa County, filed a scathing response to Lake’s final enchantment on Aug. 12.
“Rather than offering reasons why review should be granted, the Petition instead only argues that Lake is right and the lower courts are wrong,” Liddy wrote.“The Petition makes this argument by simply parroting Lake’s position below while ignoring much of the legal reasoning and all of the evidence that led the lower courts to decide against her.”
Within the enchantment, Wright argued that Maricopa County didn’t conduct the logic and accuracy checks on its poll tabulators which can be required by regulation, and that the individuals evaluating voter signatures on early and mail-in poll envelopes authorised them too rapidly to have truly accomplished any true signature verification.
However the case regulation on which Lake primarily based her argument meant that her attorneys must show that the county did not carry out any signatures verification in any respect.
Liddy identified that, throughout her second trial, when the court docket concluded that two of Lake’s personal witnesses testified that that they had personally verified signatures for the county. He added that Lake’s signature verification claims didn’t fail at trial as a result of the decrease court docket misinterpreted the regulation, however due to her attorneys’ incompetence.
“Lake’s signature verification claim failed because her allegations wrote a cheque (sic) that her proof could not cash,” Liddy wrote. “Lake’s failure in providing competent evidence to support her claim is no reason to grant review.”
Liddy countered Lake’s allegations that the county didn’t carry out logic and accuracy testing on its tabulators forward of the 2022 election, mentioning that the court docket document within the case accommodates certificates signed by the secretary of state, in addition to Republican and Democrat observers who witnessed the checks being accomplished.
Liddy additionally addressed Lake’s allegations that the county carried out further “unannounced testing” of the tabulators. He stated that supposed testing, caught on publicly-viewable cameras, was truly simply the set up of reminiscence playing cards that contained the elections program that had already undergone logic and accuracy testing.
“Lake also complains of the error codes returned in the subsequent testing of the tabulators with the installed memory cards, but Lake willfully ignores the evidence showing that Maricopa County intentionally ran test ballots that would return these errors to ensure that the tabulators were reading such ballots appropriately,” Liddy wrote.
In keeping with Phoenix lawyer and Lake critic Tom Ryan, the Arizona Supreme Court docket’s denial of this enchantment is the top of the street for Lake’s long-enduring problem to the outcomes of the 2022 election.
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“To paraphrase a quote from Charles Dickens in his 1843 short story ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Kari Lake’s case is as dead as a doornail,” Ryan informed the Arizona Mirror, through electronic mail. “Or to paraphrase Monty Python in their Dead Parrot skit, Kari Lake’s case is bereft of life, joined the Choir Eternal, kicked the bucket, bought the farm, is without any observable metabolic processes, and is not pining for the fjords of Norway. It is dead.”
Lake filed her preliminary election problem in Maricopa County Superior Court docket Dec. 9, 2022. She misplaced that trial, appealed the choice, and was granted a brand new trial on solely one of many a number of claims thought-about in the course of the first trial.
She misplaced her second trial in Could 2023 and has been laboring to persuade the appeals courts or the Arizona Supreme Court docket to reverse that call ever since.
Lake and the attorneys that represented her in each trials have all confronted repercussions for his or her false allegations of election fraud.
Scottsdale divorce lawyer Bryan Blehm and Washington, D.C., employment lawyer Kurt Olsen had been each sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court docket in Could 2023 for making false claims in considered one of Lake’s appeals. The attorneys wrote that it was an “undisputed fact” that greater than 35,000 ballots had been illegally inserted into batches of authorized ballots in Maricopa County when the November 2022 ballots had been being sorted shortly after Election Day, however the excessive court docket decided that was not true.
In June, a Supreme Court docket Panel dominated to droop Blehm’s regulation license for 60 days as self-discipline for his false statements, and in October the panel formally admonished Olsen for a similar motive.
The judges on the panel defined in Olsen’s disciplinary ruling that he was granted leniency as a result of he willingly participated within the disciplinary listening to and since he promised to be extra cautious along with his wording sooner or later.
Blehm skipped his disciplinary listening to, with out first informing the court docket, and didn’t cooperate within the proceedings.
Lake herself is the topic of a defamation lawsuit for the election fraud lies she unfold about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer after she misplaced the 2022 election.
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The case is presently within the discovery part, after in April Lake legally conceded that her statements had been false. She later claimed publicly that she by no means lied and that she solely gave up defending herself within the defamation case as a result of it was only a distraction tactic to intervene along with her marketing campaign for the Senate.
The quantity of damages that Lake and her marketing campaign owe Richer for safety prices, loss to his fame and psychological well being points brought on by her statements, in addition to punitive damages, shall be decided in a jury trial, with a pretrial listening to set for February.
Neither Olsen nor Wright responded to a request for remark early Thursday night.
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