Republican Kari Lake narrowly beat the filing deadline on Friday to submit her campaign’s lawsuit arguing that Maricopa County conducted an unfair and illegitimate election.
Maricopa County was plagued by widespread ballot tabulation errors on Election Day, which disproportionately affected Republican voters that were more likely to turn out and vote for Kari Lake on November 8, the lawsuit contends.
Lake made a simple argument about the election on Twitter:
“LFG,” she wrote alongside an image of the filed lawsuit.
“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” she added. “Stay tuned, folks.”
Lake filed the lawsuit only minutes ahead of the Friday deadline, as reported by ABC News’ Garrett Archer.
The 70-page lawsuit lists a series of complaints including voting machine malfunction, tabulator errors, estimated disenfranchised voters due to longer lines, chain-of-custody errors pertaining to hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes, mishandling of “Box 3” ballots, signature verification errors, Maricopa County’s alleged infringement of voters’ free speech about the election, and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ role certifying her own election to Governor-Elect of Arizona.
The heart of the lawsuit is that “Thousands of voters, disproportionately Republican, gave up voting due to the long wait lines or simply avoided the polls after seeing the chaos reported in the news.”
“The expert evidence [provided by pollster Richard Baris] shows conservatively that at least between 15,603 and 29,257 Republican voters were disenfranchised from voting as a direct consequence of the voting machine failures in Maricopa,” the lawsuit stated. This would hypothetically fall into the range necessary to overturn the election results.
“The official election results certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the marquee race at the top of the ballot, a contest for the governorship between Hobbs herself and Kari Lake, showed a difference in votes between the two candidates of approximately 0.67% (17,117 votes out of about 2,559,485 cast),” the lawsuit points out. “The separation of votes between Hobbs and Lake is far narrower than the number of presumptively illegal and illegally cast ballots in Arizona.”
The “illegally cast ballots,” as the lawsuit argues, refers to those lacking a clear chain-of-custody, which is a felony offense in Arizona elections.
“Testimony by whistleblowers and witnesses with first-hand knowledge shows that Maricopa County officials violated Arizona chain of custody laws for hundreds of thousands of these mail-in ballots,” the suit states. “These chain of custody laws are a critical deterrent to keep illegal mail-in votes from infecting the election. With no chain of custody, there is no way to tell whether over 300,000 ballots cast in Maricopa County are legal ballots.”
“Maricopa County also permitted the counting of tens of thousands of mail-in and drop box ballots that did not satisfy signature verification requirements,” the lawsuit continued.
The lawsuit can be read in full below:
On Thursday Trump campaign attorney, Christina Bobb, previewed this historic filing.
Watch:
