FILE – Kari Lake speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brando, File)
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake failed to keep Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s (R) defamation lawsuit on hold Tuesday, meaning the case move towards discovery and trial.
In an orders list, the Arizona Supreme Court, having denied Lake’s petition for review, rejected the attorneys’ fees request and ordered the stay lifted.
In December, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman ruled that the election official’s defamation suit should move forward. While Lake claimed after her 2022 gubernatorial election loss that intentionally printed “misconfigured ballots” and 300,000 “illegal ballots” had made a mockery of the contest in Maricopa County, the judge found that Richer made “actionable defamation claim(s)” regarding “provably false” statements that a trial jury can determine are “either true or false.”
The allegedly defamatory Lake statements included claims that Richer sabotaged vote tabulators that Election Day by purposefully printing the “wrong image” (one inch smaller) and claims that “300,000 illegal ballots” infected the election:
“[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.”
Finding that Lake’s remarks were not merely “imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole,” the judge noted that specifics surrounding ballot image size and the number of allegedly illegal ballots are matters that can be proven true or false. Adleman then refused to pause discovery, leading to Lake’s appeal — and eventual denial.
Richer reacted on X to the state high court’s ruling by saying “words matter.”
“Anyone who followed any of the court cases, anyone who paid any attention to the news, anyone who knew even a smidge about how elections work, should have known these HIGHLY SPECIFIC, easily falsifiable, claims were, in fact, false,” he said. “And those false claims — broadcast to millions of people, often while seeking donations — had, no surprise, a very material impact on me and mine.”
Lake’s petition was denied the same day that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) announced she would not be seeking reelection, leaving Lake and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) the leading contenders for the seat.
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