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After losing election, Arizona’s Kari Lake loses court fights, too

Kari Lake boasted that she had filed the “strongest election lawsuit the country has ever seen.” After a series of legal failures, that hasn’t held up well.

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Kari Lake didn’t take it especially well when she narrowly lost Arizona’s gubernatorial race last fall. As it turns out, more than six months later, the Republican conspiracy theorist is still losing, though her latest defeats have been in the courts instead of the ballot box.

NBC News reported overnight on the failed candidate coming up short, yet again, in her effort to overturn Democrat Katie Hobbs’ 2022 gubernatorial victory.

In a 6-page ruling, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled that Lake had not provided evidence of misconduct in the county’s signature-verification procedures for early ballots. Lake, a former TV anchor and prominent election denier, lost last year’s gubernatorial race by 17,117 votes and alleged the victory was marred by misconduct and illegal votes.

Given multiple opportunities to present evidence to substantiate those allegations, the GOP nominee has repeatedly failed.

At this point, some readers are probably asking, “Wait, didn’t she already lose in court? Haven’t we talked about this before?” The answer is yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

To briefly recap, the far-right election denier first filed suit in April 2022, asking that Maricopa and Pima counties be blocked from using electronic election equipment.

It wasn’t altogether clear why Lake had a problem with electronic election equipment, or why local officials shouldn’t be allowed to utilize the technology, and the case was thrown out a few months later. A judge later ordered sanctions against Lake’s attorneys in the case, concluding that they filed a “frivolous” and deceptive complaint.

In the wake of her defeat, the Arizonan filed another lawsuit, ostensibly to present evidence of election irregularities. Much of the case was thrown out before the trial even began, but after her case was heard, a local judge — who was appointed by a former Republican governor — concluded, “The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence.”

Lake ultimately took the case to the Arizona Supreme Court, which directed the trial court to reassess her claim challenging the signature-verification procedures. The lower court did exactly that, and again found that the Republican simply didn’t have any evidence.

In fact, during the proceedings, Lake’s legal team called a “star witness” who ended up helping the other side.

Let’s not forget that about a month after her election defeat, the Arizona Republican traveled to — where else? — Mar-a-Lago, where she boasted that she had filed the “strongest election lawsuit the country has ever seen.” The losing GOP candidate added that her case is “chock-full of evidence.”

Every judge who has heard the case has come to the opposite conclusion.

Under traditional political rules, the combination of Lake’s electoral and legal failures would effectively end her career in politics. But under contemporary GOP rules, Lake apparently intends to parlay her failures into a U.S. Senate campaign.

This post revises our related earlier coverage.