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Kari Lake loses election challenge

Kari Lake (photo, left) has lost her election lawsuit.

An Arizona judge rejected her exaggerated claims of election problems, and false claims of fraud by election workers (read his decision here).

As expected, the judge ruled the defeated GOP candidate didn’t prove Maricopa County’s election-day glitches were intentional or changed the outcome. She had to prove both.

Despite the humiliating court defeat, Lake insisted the trial “proved” that elections “are being held outside the law” (see story here), and vowed to appeal (see story here).

If she does, she’ll get shot down again, because her claims have no factual or legal merit. Her lawsuit was unwinnable from the start. Candidates aren’t entitled to flawless elections. She had to prove that fraud changed the result, and couldn’t because it didn’t happen.

A county official testified that temporary technicians trying to fix malfunctioning heat settings on ballot printers inadvertently activated a setting that shrank the ballots from 20 inches to 19 inches, which tabulators couldn’t read, so the ballots were counted by another process (details in story here).

Only about 1,300 ballots were affected, and Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes, forcing her attorneys to argue the problems kept thousands of her supporters from voting. That didn’t happen, and the judge didn’t credit a partisan witness’s squirrelly statistical analysis, stating that elections are “decided by votes, not by [exit] polling responses.”

That witness works for a polling firm banned from FiveThirtyEight, which rates pollsters for reliability. He contended FiveThirtyEight was not “an authority” on pollsters. Testimony like that won’t elevate any witness’s testimony. It’s like attacking the Pope.

In fact Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight, is a highly respected evaluator of polling data. Silver correctly predicted the presidential winner in 49 of 50 states in 2008, all 50 states in 2012, and assigned Trump much higher odds of winning in 2016 than anyone else.

The real reason for Lake’s defeat was that voters in Arizona, as elsewhere in the 2022 elections, rejected extremists like Lake, who based her campaign on Trump’s election lies. You could say God wasn’t on her side.

Lake, a former newscaster, had no prior political experience, and has no qualifications to govern a state. Her legal complaint (read it here) was filled with wild accusations and baseless conspiracy theories.

The judge threw out 8 of her 10 allegations, but allowed a trial on the factual issues of her other 2 claims, which were that “election officials committed intentional misconduct sufficient to change the race’s outcome.” (Read his order here.) In the end, she had no credible evidence of that, and was easily countered by the county’s lawyers, because it didn’t happen.

The Hill notes, “The judge’s decision marks the fourth dismissal of a GOP challenge to Arizona’s election results.” Rightwing election conspiracy theories play well to Trump’s base, and election denial helped far-right candidates win primaries in an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, but MAGA efforts to undermine elections have uniformly hit a brick wall in the courts, where law and evidence rules, not speeches designed to rile up mobs.

The Maricopa County election office was the site of tumultuous pro-Trump protests after the 2020 election, and election officials there were threatened. As the state’s major urban county, it looms large in Arizona elections, because it has over 60% of the state’s population and voters. The rest of the state is mostly sparsely populated rural areas.

A hindsight look at the 2022 elections shows that “saving democracy” was a winning campaign issue for Democrats in this campaign cycle. GOP strategy focused on the economy and inflation, and political observers questioned the Democratic strategy of focusing on Republican attacks on the right to vote and have votes counted, but exit polls revealed deep voter concern about the GOP’s anti-democracy tendencies under Trump and MAGA extremism.

The Democrats held all Senate seats and gained one, held all governorships and gained several, picked up several legislatures, and lost fewer than 10 House seats. Much larger House losses had been predicted. The GOP was hobbled by extremist candidates like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, dishonest candidates like Herschel Walker in Georgia, and wacky candidates like Kari Lake and Mark Finchem in Arizona.

MAGA candidates like these promoted distrust of elections, but instead were distrusted by voters. It’s no mystery what Republicans must do to become acceptable to voters again: Stop attacking democracy and the rule of law, play by the rules, stop lying, reject extremism, crack down on the racism and bigotry in their party, respect people’s rights, and show they can govern responsibly.

They also need to nominate candidates that level-headed people can vote for. That means the Kari Lakes of the world shouldn’t get to first base in their primaries and caucuses. They didn’t in the past, but under the influence of Trumpism, the party’s internal guardrails failed. They need to be rebuilt.

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