The Arizona Supreme Court held a private conference on Tuesday to discuss whether to accept Kari Lake’s appeal of lower courts dismissing her lawsuit contesting her loss of the gubernatorial race. In addition to her initial petition for review, Lake filed a reply to the defendants’ responses to her petition, and The Gavel Project’s Ryan Heath filed his own amicus curiae brief supporting her.
The Arizona Sun Times spoke with Jennifer Wright, who served as the Arizona Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit civil attorney under the previous Republican administration, but who joined Abe Hamadeh’s legal team in his election challenge in that race due to the current Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes “targeting” her. Wright brought up one of the primary concerns Lake has pointed out about the lower courts’ dismissals; their reliance on a “clear and convincing” standard for evidence.
“The court should grant review to fix the legal errors by the lower courts reading in a clear and convincing standard of proof,” Wright said. “Such a standard of proof is ordinarily legislatively, not judicially prescribed. Creating an extra-statutory standard of proof is the kind of judicial activism that conservative courts typically deplore.” Republican governors appointed all seven members of the Arizona Supreme Court.
Lake’s reply summarized her objections to the responses from Katie Hobbs, Adrian Fontes, and Maricopa County, “In an effort to distract the Court from the core issues, all three Responses attempt to miscast the Petition as primarily raising new and contradictory disputes of fact concerning Maricopa’s violation of Arizona chain-of-custody laws.”
Lake explained that her claim that 35,563 unaccounted-for ballots were injected into the election at Runbeck Election Systems, the third-party private vendor assisting with ballot collection, “has been an issue since the inception of this case,” she said it is not some new claim that is barred from appellate review.
Read the rest of the article at The Arizona Sun Times