A Maricopa County judge on Monday night handed former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake another loss in her latest election lawsuit.
Lake, a Republican and former local news anchor, lost the battleground state governor’s race to then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, by roughly 17,000 votes—less than one percentage point—in November. However, Lake has refused to concede the election and filed a lawsuit over the results, alleging that irregularities in Maricopa County prevented her from winning the county, and disenfranchised Republican voters.
She faced her latest courtroom loss after Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson rejected her claims that Maricopa election officials improperly verified the signatures on thousands of ballots, tilting the outcome in the state’s largest county that is home to Phoenix against her.
During the three-day trial, Lake’s legal team argued that Maricopa County election workers compared voter signatures with their past records too hastily to meet Arizona’s legal standard for comparison, including many that took less than two seconds, according to The Arizona Republic.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Thompson rejected Lake’s legal argument, writing in his decision that current law makes no “requirement that a specific amount of time be applied to review any given signature at any level of review.”
“Accepting that argument would require the Court to re-write not only the EPM [Elections Procedures Manual] but Arizona law to insert a minimum time for signature verification and specify the variables to be considered in the process,” he wrote.
Newsweek has reached out to Lake’s press team for comment via email. Following the ruling, Lake only tweeted, “Big announcement tomorrow!” In a separate tweet, she shared a GIF that reads, “Fix this broken system,” with the caption, “Amen.”
Thompson’s ruling upheld the victory of Hobbs, who was sworn into office earlier in the year, making her the state’s first Democratic governor since 2009. Arizona’s gubernatorial race was one of the most hotly contested elections of the 2022 midterms, as the state is roughly split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but has shifted to the left in recent election cycles.
While Lake lost the gubernatorial election, she remains a rising star in the Republican Party. She has signaled she may run for Senate in 2024, when Republicans hope to beat Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema and has even been named as a potential vice presidential contender. Her refusal to concede the election has been compared to former President Donald Trump’s response to his 2020 presidential election defeat.
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal losses for Lake. In March, the Arizona Supreme Court threw out six of the seven claims in her legal challenge, only accepting her concerns about signature verification.
Her legal team was also sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making an “unequivocally false” claim about 35,000 ballots being “injected” into Maricopa County after the election.