Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake appeared a happy warrior while verbally jousting with British journalist Piers Morgan over her decision to challenge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ victory in November.
By the official tally, Hobbs won by about 17,000 votes, or 0.7 percent of the ballots counted.
In her lawsuit, Lake pointed to the Election Day chaos in Maricopa County involving misconfigured ballot printers in the majority of voting centers, a lack of chain-of-custody documentation for over 300,000 ballots, and whistleblower allegations that the county failed to verify the identity of tens of thousands of mail-in voters as reasons the election in the county must be redone.
Morgan labeled both Lake and former President Donald Trump election deniers.
“I would simply say to you what I said to Donald Trump: I don’t think it works for you guys. I don’t think denying the results of democratic elections is an effective tool to actually win elections,” Morgan said.
“We can’t continue to run elections this way, and we know that we won, and we’re going to continue to fight this in a court of law,” Lake replied.
She also pointed to a December Rasmussen poll that found that 72 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement she made after the botched election: “This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. This is about our sacred right to vote, a right that many voters were sadly deprived of on Nov. 8.”
Lake noted that 75 percent of Election Day voters chose her, meaning she was the most impacted by the ballot printer problems in 59 percent of voting centers.
“They printed intentionally the wrong image on the ballot, and that was meant to have the ballots spit out and rejected by the tabulators” primarily in Republican areas, she alleged.
Coincidence?? ?
Look how perfectly Election Day Polling FAILURES on November 8th match up with the REPUBLICAN heat map.
Share this anywhere and everywhere you possibly can. SHARE! pic.twitter.com/1JCD7fvNDX
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) February 1, 2023
Shelby Busch with We the People AZ Alliance testified before an Arizona Senate committee last month that based on log files her group obtained, there were nearly a quarter of a million ballot-reading errors on Election Day.
Lake upbraided Morgan, saying, “It’s really rich that you’re sitting across the pond acting like you know what happened on Election Day.”
Morgan replied, “There does come a point when, for the future of democracy, you and Donald Trump have to accept at some point you lost an election. Otherwise, the entire system collapses.”
“If your simple response to losing is always, ‘We didn’t lose, we won,’ then democracy dies,” he contended.
Lake shared that her father was a high school football coach and a history and government teacher, and he taught her that if you lose “fair and square,” you walk away.
But that’s not what happened in the governor’s race, she asserted.
“In Arizona, I can’t walk 10 feet without an Arizonan saying, ‘I voted for you. Everybody I know voted for you. Our ballot was rejected on Election Day. Please keep fighting for us,’” Lake said.
“I don’t mean any offense to you, but I frankly don’t give a damn what you think about it. I’m fighting for the people of Arizona,” she proclaimed.
In December, a trial court judge ruled in Hobbs’ favor, finding that Lake’s legal team did not provide “clear and convincing” evidence of intentional misconduct by Maricopa County officials to impact the result of the race.
Lake argues in her appeal that the judge used the wrong standard, saying, based on court precedent, that misconduct that invalidates an election can be much broader than intentional action taken in favor of a particular candidate.
Lake said she’s expecting the Arizona Court of Appeals to issue its ruling next week. The Republican has pledged to take her case to the state Supreme Court, if necessary.
Morgan actually asked some good questions, and Lake looked like a Reagan-esque happy warrior through it all.
Well done!
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
