Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, still won’t give up. On Thursday, she said she is putting together a team of lawyers and gathering evidence that voters had trouble voting on Election Day while she thinks about what to do next.
Lake, backed by Donald Trump, went to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Thursday, according to a spokesman for her campaign who spoke to The Associated Press. The Washington Post was the first to say that she went to a luncheon by the America First Policy Institute, a lobbying group made up of people who used to work for Trump.
Lake’s most comprehensive public statement since she lost the election was a 2-minute-and-a-half-minute video in which she didn’t say anything about giving up. Before the election, she wouldn’t say she would give up if Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, won the race.
“Don’t worry, I’ve put together the best and brightest lawyers, and we’re trying everything we can to make up for all the wrongs done this week,” Lake said. “I’m doing everything I can to make things right.”
I’m so sorry they did this to us, Arizona. We will not let them get away with disenfranchising our Vote.
If you experienced issues on Election Day, please submit them at https://t.co/16ZEKvDz0L pic.twitter.com/ab1ipDGcUg
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 18, 2022
She said that problems with ballot printers at about a third of the polling places in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state, made the lines even longer at some polling places. She said that people who couldn’t wait at the polls lost their right to vote because of the problems. “What happened to Arizonans on Election Day is unforgivable,” she said.
Election officials from the county stated that all the ballots had been counted and that voters were free to cast their votes at any polling location in the county. Many polling locations had very little to no line, and the wait times were provided online.
The errors were traced down to a setting on the printer, which sometimes caused the ballots to print with a font too light for the tabulators working onsite to read. They stated that they utilised the same settings for the primary election in August and the pre-election testing and did not see any widespread problems.
There were approximately 17,000 ballots that were not scanned at the vote counters located at the precincts but were instead deposited in a collection box to be counted by more advanced technology at the election headquarters situated in the county’s administrative building. The name “box three” has become commonly used to refer to the collecting box.
Bill Gates, the Republican head of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, has blamed Kelli Ward, the leader of the state GOP, and other prominent Republicans for causing delays and long lines. This is because they instructed their followers not to utilise box three during the election.
On Monday, Gates was quoted as saying, “This team, we have taken our responsibility in this.” “However, I am not prepared to take responsibility for problems brought on by other people. In addition, it is very evident to me that the length of those lines was a direct result of the leaders of one political party distributing false information.
Because of the problems, Republicans requested a judge to extend the polling stations hours. The judge stated that no evidence was produced to show anyone’s voting rights were taken away.
The majority of Democratic voters cast their votes using ballots that were mailed to them. Because Lake and other prominent Republicans argued that voting in person on Election Day was more secure, something election experts dispute, the results of those votes substantially benefitted the Republican Party.
Since the Associated Press and other news organisations declared Hobbs the winner of the contest on Monday, Lake has not made many public statements. Midway through Wednesday night, she uploaded a video to her YouTube channel that featured vignettes from her campaign trail set to the lines “I won’t back down.”
In a video she posted on Thursday, she argued that Hobbs, who is now serving as secretary of state, ought to have disassociated herself from any involvement in the race. While the office of the secretary of state is responsible for developing election procedures and certifying election equipment, the counting of ballots remains the responsibility of the state’s 15 counties.
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