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I read Kari Lake's lawsuit so you don't have to, the AZ Republic analyzed it so I don't have to [1]
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Date: 2022-12-17
Time to order Kari-Out
Up front: I’m not a lawyer although I played one on stage. Still, I think I can find the subject and predicate in most sentences, and then place said sentence in its appropriate context. I don’t know most court precedents other than the famous ones we were taught, but you don’t have to be able to pass the bar exam to know that the recent batch of Arizona GOP lawsuits is little more than a thrown-together hodgepodge of complaints that have already been tossed out of court—just longer.
Heck, a couple weeks ago a judge sanctioned Kari Lake and Mark Finchem’s lawyers for wasting the court’s time with frivolous lawsuits. But even after those cases were tossed, we knew more lawsuits were coming from Arizona’s failed gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, as well as losers Mark Finchem (Secretary of State) and Abe Hamadeh (Attorney General). They just can’t quit trump and his denialism. The losers did not disappoint—filing lawsuits last week at the deadline.
I don’t know how Republicans think the current filings are an improvement over the previous “frivolous” lawsuits, even with more pages added. In fact, yesterday a judge tossed Finchem’s case (“with prejudice”), since it provides no evidence of election fraud, nor does it demonstrate in any way how he could make up the 120,000 votes by which Democrat Adrian Fontes beat the Oath Keeper and Jan. 6 insurrectionist. Finchem blamed his loss on “commie scum”—always a sound legal argument.
Kari Lake lost to Katie Hobbs by about 17,000, so one might think she has more of a case, although her new 70-page lawsuit feels similar to the earlier one that was thrown out of court, with her lawyers paying the legal fees. The new filing by the same lawyers adds screenshots of texts from Republicans complaining about 60-minute waits (220 of them, of which 217 voted). Funny, the Arizona GOP didn’t complain about very long waits when trump won in 2016, or the half-day drives to vote on the reservations. But if an old white guy in Sun City has to wait 30 minutes because of a printer problem, it must be “fraud” and Arizona should hold another election!
So I started reading Lake’s lawsuit, taking notes and copying whole sections of garbage, but then the notes went on and on to such a degree I knew I couldn’t address all the bullshit in a Kos diary. So I’ll leave the detailed legal review and response to the experts, and today the Arizona Republic release an analysis of Lake’s document that does exactly that—takes apart the lawsuit page-by-page.
Just a couple highlights: As the Republic story notes, Lake’s lawsuit spends a lot of time critiquing Katie Hobbs and others for events associated with the 2020 election, so I’m not sure why this has anything to do with Lake’s defeat this year. As evidence, for example, the document includes an image of a ballot signature that does not match the signature on file. Okay, but this ballot is from 2020! Or there’s this bogus complaint:
Secretary Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials, including Recorder Stephen Richer, participated in an unconstitutional government censorship operation using an Election Misinformation Reporting Portal created by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (“CISA”).
There was nothing “unconstitutional” about Hobbs’ action, which did not amount to a “censorship operation” at all. This complaint refers to a 2021 series of tweets that claimed Arizona’s election system was owned and operated by foreign agencies, and that, supposedly, was the reason trump lost Arizona in 2020—because foreign actors flipped the votes.
The tweets were lies so Secretary of State Hobbs, who was not running for Governor at the time, did what election officials are supposed to do: Her office referred the lying tweets to the Center for Internet Security, the firm government agencies use to report online disinformation. CIS then notified Twitter, which took down the fraudulent tweets immediately—just like the system was supposed to work. But what does this 2021 story have to do with the Republicans’ statewide drubbing in Arizona this midterm election?
Elsewhere the Republic’s review includes a lot of comments such as “these numbers don’t match Maricopa County’s count” or “there’s no evidence to support this statement,” or “these numbers are wrong,” or “this statement was already tossed out of court.” The lawsuit, for instance, will cite “an expert” who claims the printer problem in Maricopa County cost Lake roughly 15,000 to 30,000 votes with no proof of where those numbers came from other than some “expert” butthole (the lawsuit is full of these seemingly convincing statements because numbers).
Monday at 9AM Kari Lake’s team and the defendants from Maricopa County and the Secretary of State’s Office will meet before a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to weigh Lake’s claim that she should be declared the winner of Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election. I’m guessing by early afternoon we can order Kari-Out.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/17/2141157/-I-read-Kari-Lake-s-lawsuit-so-you-don-t-have-to-the-AZ-Republic-analyzed-it-so-I-don-t-have-to
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