Kari Lake Says Door Has Been Pushed Open for 'Greatest Election Case Ever'

• Kari Lake, a former Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate, has said that the door is now open to the "greatest election case ever" after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that one of her complaints about the 2022 election had been wrongly dismissed.
• The complaint is about mail-in ballot signature verification and Lake claims it is a "smoking gun" that would show voter fraud.
• The state's supreme court found that a lower court had been wrong to dismiss the complaint based on its interpretation of a legal doctrine.

Former Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has said the door is now open to the "great election case ever" after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that one of her complaints about the 2022 election had been wrongly dismissed.

Lake spoke to Just the News about the case in an interview she shared on her Twitter account on Friday and described her complaint about mail-in ballot signature verification as a "smoking gun" that would show voter fraud.

The Arizona Supreme Court dismissed most of Lake's case in an order on Wednesday but they also ruled that a lower court had been wrong to dismiss a complaint about the signature verification process on early ballots in Maricopa County.

"This is a victory," Lake told Just the News' John Solomon and Amanda Head. "We've been trying for three years to get our foot in the door on one of these election cases and I've always said we have the greatest election case ever and the door's been pushed open."

"And we're in the house now and this is good news," she added.

Head pointed out that the Arizona Supreme Court had dismissed six of Lake's seven complaints and asked if the issue about signature verification was the most important complaint.

"I actually do think it is," Lake said. "All of our complaints were important but this one is, to me, the smoking gun. This is how we get this glut of mail-in ballots with phony signatures.

"It's a sham - the whole signature verification procedure," Lake went on. "They're not following the procedures and they're allowing literally tens of thousands - we projected more than 140,000 bogus ballots got rushed through in this signature verification portion of our elections."

Lake said that three whistleblowers have claimed that "literally scribbles and no signatures at all were being passed through."

Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs defeated Lake by more than 17,000 votes and was sworn in as governor on January 2.

In her lawsuit challenging the 2022 gubernatorial election, Lake claimed Maricopa County's method of signature verification for early ballot envelopes did not comply with state law.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson threw out her lawsuit in December 2022, dismissing her complaint about signature verification. The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld Thompson's decision on February 16, saying Lake's claims were "quite simply, sheer speculation."

However, the state's supreme court found that both Thompson and the Court of Appeals had erred in dismissing the signature verification complaint because they had wrongly applied a legal doctrine called "laches" which prevents delayed lawsuits and challenges to election procedures after the election has taken place.

"Contrary to the ruling of the trial court and the Court of Appeals opinion, this signature verification challenge is to the application of the policies, not to the policies themselves," the Arizona Supreme Court said in its opinion this week.

"Therefore, it was erroneous to dismiss this claim under the doctrine of laches because Lake could not have brought this challenge before the election," the court said.

The issue will now be sent back to Thompson, who will be tasked with deciding whether the complaint can be dismissed on other grounds or whether Lake's complaint has merit. The state supreme court did not rule on the merit of the complaint.

Newsweek has reached out to Kari Lake's team via email for comment.