Kari Lake, who prayed for a legal win and got a tiny one, turned it into a big boast:
The tiny win was the judge ordering a trial on two of her factual claims. Where her prayer flopped was his dismissal of her malfeasance allegations against Katie Hobbs, making Hobbs’ testimony irrelevant. As a result, Lake’s lawyers, who know much more about legal procedure than she does, withdrew their subpoena of Hobbs (see below).
Hobbs is Arizona’s secretary of state (“AZSOS”) and also governor-elect, having defeated Lake last month.
I recall that when I started law school, the dean told my incoming class, “Hoping and praying aren’t a substitute for studying.” A slightly modified version of this might go, “Prayer takes you only so far, then you must have a case.”
Don’t get me wrong, prayer has its place. We all need the comfort of prayer now and then. In legal proceedings, somebody always loses, and that’s when a priest, minister, or chaplain can step in to provide solace and grief counseling. But that kind of prayer is a caboose, not a locomotive; it doesn’t pull the train, it only brings up the rear.
That’s not the only kind of prayer. We all also pray for what we want, but grief and sadness still may come if it’s not what God wants. The judge only gave Lake a chance to prove that Maricopa County’s election-day printer malfunctions were “intentionally rigged to affect the election results,” and “did actually affect the outcome.”
He didn’t do her a favor; this is routine. You’re entitled to a trial when there are disputed material issues of fact. As his order (here) explains, Lake has “alleged intentional misconduct sufficient to affect the outcome of the election and thus has stated an issue of fact that requires going beyond the pleadings.”
What she needs now, beyond prayer, is evidence. She has to prove county employees deliberately set the printers to print ballots in ink too light to be read by tabulators. When this happens to jurors, they replace the printer cartridge.
She also has to prove county employees deliberately prevented those ballots from being counted by other means. County election officials will testify they were taken to the county election office, which has more sensitive machines that could read them, and they were all counted.
She’ll also have to prove that even if all that happened, it changed the election results, which means county employees somehow selectively prevented her votes from being printed properly and then read by tabulating machines while letting Hobbs’ votes go through.
She’ll need more than prayer to prove all this; she’ll need divine intervention. Lightning and thunder and stuff.
I know I’m bouncing between metaphors, but I think you can see she has a tall mountain to climb. From my experience of climbing Mt. Rainier, I don’t think hoping and praying will get her there. And I’m not convinced God is on her side. The Almighty wasn’t very kind to election deniers in the 2022 elections.
