Kari Lake demands state Supreme Court declare her governor after 2022 loss: court records

Kari Lake, the former Phoenix news anchor and Trump-aligned Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, filed a petition this week demanding the state Supreme Court either redo the 2022 gubernatorial election or declare her governor anyway, despite having lost, court records show.

It's the latest in a lengthy series of legal battles Lake has filed to try to get her loss in the 2022 election to Democrat Katie Hobbs, now well into her second year as governor of Arizona, thrown out, all of which have been rejected.

Lake's petition cites "new" evidence that Maricopa County failed to properly test ballot tabulators, according to local nonprofit news site AZ Law.

Malfunctioning tabulators in a handful of precincts were a key point of contention for Lake's case the election was rigged; however, courts have already rejected this argument, in part because county officials say there were alternative ways of casting ballots at these precincts and no one was prevented from voting.

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Lake also argues that 275,000 mail-in ballots need to be voided due to failure to conduct signature-matching on envelopes. "Because Hobbs eclipsed Lake by more than 10 percent of Maricopa’s early voting, under Grounds, Lake would win," the petition states.

All of this comes as Lake is running for Senate in the 2024 election, vying with Phoenix-area Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego for the seat opened up by the outgoing independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Her campaign has been fraught with tension as she has tried to apologize to moderate conservative voters who supported the late Sen. John McCain, whom she called a "loser" during the 2022 race and said his supporters should "get the hell out" of her campaign events.

She has also caught flak for repeatedly going back and forth on support for Arizona's Civil War-era abortion ban, which was set to reactivate after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the state Supreme Court held it was still valid; even some Republicans in the state legislature joined Democrats in a bipartisan measure to roll that ban back earlier this year.