Refusing to concede, Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, said Thursday she is assembling lawyers and gathering evidence of voters having difficulties casting votes on Election Day as she considers her course of action.
In a 2 1/2-minute video, Lake made her most in-depth public remarks since losing the election, but she made no mention of giving up. She had declined to declare that she would give up the race to Democrat Katie Hobbs before the election.
“Rest assured I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week,” Lake said. “I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs.”
She cited lengthy lines at some polling places in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, which were made worse by issues with ballot printers at about a third of the vote centers. She claimed that the issues rendered ineligible voters who couldn’t wait in line at the election polls.
Kari Lake: “What happened to Arizonans on Election Day is unforgivable”
Voters could go to any polling location in the county, many of which had little to no lineup, with wait times posted online, according to county election officials who claimed that all ballots had been counted.
A printer setting that occasionally resulted in ballots printing too lightly for the on-site tabulators to read was the source of the issues, according to election officials. They claimed there were no significant issues because they used the same settings for pre-election testing and the August primary.
In order to be counted by more advanced equipment at the county’s election headquarters, approximately 17,000 ballots were not scanned at precinct-based vote counters and were instead placed in a collection box. The collection container is now referred to as “box three.”
Since The Associated Press and other news outlets declared Hobbs the winner on Monday, Lake has been relatively silent. She posted a video late on Wednesday with images from the campaign trail set to the song “I Won’t Back Down.”
In her video from last Thursday, Hobbs, who is currently the secretary of state, claimed that she ought to have stayed out of the election. The state’s 15 counties handle the task of counting ballots; the secretary of state develops election procedures and certifies equipment.
