A lawyer for defeated Republican candidate Kari Lake, who lost the latest Arizona gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs, called the state's Supreme Court ruling on her legal challenge the "second win" in her election fight. Earlier this week, the court dismissed most of Lake's claims disputing her loss in the governor's race, but sent her claim regarding signature-matching back to the trial court in Maricopa County for review.
Talking with Newsmax TV White House correspondent Emerald Robinson, Lake's attorney, Kurt Olsen, claimed that the unsuccessful Republican candidate "has landed another victory," Robinson wrote on her show The Absolute Truth's Twitter account.
"I think this is actually the second win in many ways," Olsen said, following Robinson's comment saying that the Supreme Court's ruling was "somewhat of a win" for Lake. "If you recall, every one of these election challenges had been dismissed on the grounds of standing. And so, this was the first case to go to trial [...] and even though the trial court did not grant us a victory on these issues, for the first time people got to see the evidence, and judge it for themselves."
He added: "I look at this as the second victory, because we're making progress." A video of the interview with Robinson is available on Twitter.
Previously relatively unknown, Olsen came to national attention after he was hired by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to help file a lawsuit challenging Trump's defeat to the Supreme Court in 2021. Olsen reportedly talked to Donald Trump on the day of the Capitol riots about a legal strategy to use the Justice Department to reverse his 2020 election loss.
To this day, despite no evidence backing up his claims, Trump continues to state that the 2020 presidential election won by President Joe Biden was stolen or rigged. Lake, who ran in Arizona with Trump's endorsement, has consistently supported the former president's false claims.
Lake has brought her own claims of election fraud to the Arizona gubernatorial race, claiming that she would have won the election if not for ballot printers and tabulation machines malfunctioning in Maricopa County. Her legal challenge to the election's result was thrown out by both Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson and the Arizona Court of Appeals for lack of evidence.
Back in December, when Thompson first dismissed Lake's legal challenge, Olsen and the other lawyers representing the failed candidate were sanctioned in an attempt to deter "similarly baseless suits in the future."
But this didn't deter Lake from continuing to challenge the election result, appealing her case to the Arizona Supreme Court. This week, the court rejected six out of seven of her claims. A superior court judge in Maricopa County is now reviewing Lake's claim that the county did not follow signature verification procedures.
Olsen told Robinson that the issue of signature verification is "very, very significant," adding that there are "literally over a hundred thousand ballots in question because of invalid signatures that were accepted in tabulate."
Lake and her lawyers will need to provide evidence at the trial court level that Maricopa County's use of signature matching on early mail-in ballots didn't comply with Arizona law.
Newsweek has emailed Lake's team for comment.
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Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek Reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. and European politics, global affairs ... Read more
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