Republican candidate Kari Lake announces her plans to run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat during a rally, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
A judge ruled Wednesday that failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) must face a defamation lawsuit brought by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a registered Republican, over her post-2022 election loss claims of intentionally printed “misconfigured ballots” and 300,000 “illegal ballots” marring the contest.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman found that Richer made “actionable defamation claim(s)” under Arizona law that Lake’s statements are the kind of “provably false” assertions fit for a jury to evaluate as “either true or false” at trial.
What were those statements? That Richer was “responsible for intentionally printing misconfigured ballots that could not be read by the on-site tabulators at voting locations” and that he “intentionally inserted 300,000 illegal ballots into the Maricopa County vote count,” as the judge summarized Lake remarks at issue.
These are two of the Lake statements Richer referenced in the lawsuit:
“[W]e’re supposed to have a 20-inch image on a 20-inch ballot, but Richer and, Richer and Gates and their crew printed a 19-inch image, the wrong image on the ballot, so that the tabulators would jam all day long. That’s exactly what happened. They did not want us to notice this …. You know, the only person, the only thing they wanted to notice this was the tabulators so that they would jam and spit out ballots, which is exactly what happened all day on Election Day. Ballots got spit out. They got spit out over and over again. Let’s show those two again, these two men.
Richer and Gates intentionally printed the wrong image on the ballot on Election Day so that those ballots would intentionally be spit out of the tabulators …. Well these guys are really, really terrible at running elections but I found out they’re really good at lying.”
[…]
“First of all, let’s start with 300,000 ballots with zero chain of custody — I’m going to explain this in slow motion — real, in easy terms for the simpletons in the media back there. Testimony from our whistleblowers down at Runbeck proves that. 300,000 ballots lacked chain of custody.
For those of you who don’t understand what chain of custody is, it is basically the law that ensures that illegal ballots don’t get counted and don’t infect our elections. And we know that 300,000 illegal ballots, because they didn’t have chain of custody, were counted in the final total.”
Calling Richer’s factual allegations “well pled” and “actionable” as to the statements, Adleman said that Lake’s apparent attempt to “announce objective facts pertaining to the size of the ballots and the intentional conduct” of Richer can fall into the “category of statement(s) to be ‘provably false’ under the standards established by Arizona law.”
The judge also rejected Lake’s argument that she was engaging in “imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole.”
“[T]he alleged statements in this case cannot be classified merely as ‘descriptive’ language. In point of fact, Defendant Lake’s statements regarding improper 19-inch ballots and/or the existence of 300,000 fraudulent ballots may be discerned by a factfinder as either true or false when considered in the light of any available evidence,” the judge said, before crediting Richer’s arguments that Lake’s statements were “made with actual malice.”
The judge further rejected Lake’s argument that Richer sued her for “an improper purpose” and that his case should, therefore, be dismissed as a strategic lawsuit against public participation — i.e., a SLAPP suit.
“In the absence of any prima facie evidence that the lawsuit was brought for an improper purpose, Defendants’ statutory motion to dismiss will be summarily denied,” Adleman said, finding that Richer’s social media posting about suing Lake “does not establish prima facie evidence of a motivation inconsistent with our First Amendment principles.”
At the end of the ruling, the judge refused to grant Lake’s expedited motion to keep discovery on pause and ordered the parties in the case to “meet and confer in an effort to provide the Court with a proposed Amended Scheduling Order no later than January 19, 2024.”
Lake reacted to her latest courtroom loss by posting a picture of Richer on X and accusing him of suing her “for revealing the corruption in the elections he administered.”
“He has a bunch of Soros-backed attorneys representing him. This is about taking away our First Amendment rights and interfering in the US Senate race,” she said. “This case should have been tossed out of court.”
Read the ruling here.
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