The Arizona Supreme Court declined to award significant sanctions against Kari Lake’s attorneys for contesting the election results of the gubernatorial race. Instead, on Thursday the court ordered $2,000 in sanctions against her attorneys for asserting it was an “undisputed fact” that 35,563 ballots were inserted into the ballot counting process at Runbeck Election Systems. The court declined to award attorneys fees to her opponents.
The Arizona Supreme Court said in its opinion that Lake “repeatedly” asserted in pleadings that 35,563 ballots were “added” or “injected” at Runbeck. “Not only is that allegation strongly disputed by the other parties, this Court concluded and expressly stated that the assertion was unsupported by the record, and nothing in Lake’s Motion for Leave to file a motion for reconsideration provides reason to revisit that issue.”
The court added, “Although Lake may have permissibly argued that an inference could be made that some ballots were added, there is no evidence that 35,563 ballots were and, more to the point here, this was certainly disputed by the Respondents. The representation that this was an ‘undisputed fact’ is therefore unequivocally false.”
The justices said, “Because Lake’s attorney has made false factual statements to the Court, we conclude that the extraordinary remedy of a sanction under ARCAP 25 is appropriate.”
Lake’s argument about the allegedly inserted ballots focused on the discrepancy between “the number of early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Receipt of Delivery forms dated November 8-9, 2022, [which] totaled 263,379 ballots,” versus “298,942 Election Day early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Scan Receipts.” Whistleblowers testified on Lake’s behalf that there were failures at both Runbeck and Maricopa County Elections tracking the chain of custody of the ballots. Failing to track the chain of custody of ballots is a class 2 misdemeanor under Arizona law.
Read the rest of the article at The Arizona Sun Times