Kari Lake, the Arizona gubernatorial candidate who refused to commit to accepting a losing election result, is now challenging her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. “I am still in this fight,” the Trump-backed Republican says in a video posted to Twitter on Thursday, adding she’s assembled the “best and brightest” legal team to challenge the election in which she claims “tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters were disenfranchised.” Throughout the race, Lake—who supports former President Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020—called on Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, to recuse herself from overseeing the election. After the race was called for Hobbs, Lake described the result as “BS.”
“For two years, I’ve been sounding the alarm about our broken election system here in Arizona. And this past week has confirmed everything we’ve been saying,” Lake, a former TV news anchor, says in the video, per Mediaite. “The fox was guarding the henhouse, and because of that, voters have been disenfranchised.” She claims “nearly half of all polling locations had problems with tabulating machines and printers” on Election Day. Election officials have acknowledged issues with ballot tabulation machines in some 70 of Maricopa County’s 223 voting centers but say no one was disenfranchised, per the New York Times. They say affected voters were simply asked to deposit their ballots in a secure box so they could be tabulated later.
Regardless, Republican groups are collecting accounts of voters who experienced issues at the polls, which the Times notes “could become fodder for lawsuits claiming the election was troubled.” The outlet adds Lake’s stance “could prove a turning point for her party and the far-right faction of election deniers.” While establishment Republicans have been urging Lake to concede—Republican Gov. Doug Ducey called to congratulate Hobbs on Monday—others are urging her to keep up the fight, Trump among them. According to the Times, Trump called Lake on Sunday and falsely claimed Democrats were trying to steal her election victory—a claim he repeated on his social media site. (Read more Kari Lake stories.)
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