Arizona Republican Kari Lake is asking voters to elect her to the U.S. Senate, but on Thursday, judges are slated to hear an appeal in her case claiming she won the Governor’s Office nearly 18 months ago.
Lake’s appeal of a decision affirming Maricopa County followed the law to verify voter signatures is scheduled for oral arguments before an Arizona Court of Appeals in Tucson. The arguments are set for 2 p.m. and will be livestreamed via the court’s website.
A former television news anchor turned politician, Lake in December 2022 filed the case disputing her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Hobbs won by 17,117 votes, a margin of 0.7 percentage points.
Lake alleged a variety of misdeeds, spinning issues with ballot tabulators and long lines on Election Day into claims that tens of thousands of voters were disenfranchised. A new election should take place, or a judge should rule she was the rightful governor, she and her legal team argued.
The case has been pending in Arizona courts since, and previously made one trip to the state’s Supreme Court, which affirmed that judges got it right in dismissing most of Lake’s legal claims as unfounded. Her claims were “insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law,” the top state court’s March 2022 opinion reads. The court later fined Lake’s lawyers for making “unequivocally false” claims about 35,000 ballots added to the vote count.