“Desperate and delusional”: Legal experts rip Kari Lake’s “poorly written” election lawsuit

Failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2022 midterm election will likely be thrown out due to the generic claims it makes, which are not supported by any evidence, legal experts say. 

Lake, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, lost by more than 17,000 votes to Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. She filed the 70-page lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior court late last week, claiming that the election in the county was flawed by “intentional misconduct.” 

The suit also alleges the “hacking” of election equipment to disenfranchise Republican voters and the inclusion of “illegal ballots [that] infected the election.” Lake has demanded that the court either declares her the winner or invalidate the results of the election and conduct a new one.

The first hearing for Lake’s suit is set for Tuesday, but legal experts say that it should be swiftly dismissed as it fails to make specific claims. 

“It is poorly written, frankly,” Democratic election attorney Jim Barton told the Arizona Mirror. “It’s so long and meandering. I think the underlying claims are terrible and the lawsuit is terrible and it’s, frankly, embarrassing that this kind of thing can get filed.”

Barton, whose former clients have included candidates and ballot campaigns, said that Lake’s claims do not provide the level of specificity needed to file a lawsuit. He added that lawsuits challenging the results of elections must be “tightly created”, because “airing generic grievances does not work in this context.”

State law usually dictates that election challenges must be based on misconduct by election boards, ineligibility of a candidate, bribery or another offense, illegal votes, or an erroneous vote count.

This is in stark contrast to some of the generic claims Lake makes in her suit, which includes no actual evidence, but rather anecdotes of “chaos” at the Maricopa County polling locations on Election Day, the inclusion of “illegal ballots,” and supposedly “hacked” election equipment.

“I don’t think this case will go very far and will probably be dismissed pretty quickly,” University of Iowa Law professor Derek Muller said in an interview with the Mirror. “She lost by a significant margin. There are very few specific details. There are lots of details that are trying to relitigate the 2020 election.”

Muller added that he was “surprised” by just how much of Lake’s lawsuit regurgitated claims from the 2020 election challenges. “There’s just not a great path forward based on the speculative kinds of claims that are being made in this complaint,” he said.

Lake also asserts that some mail-in ballot signatures did not match the ones on file, but does not cite any evidence to back up the claim. The only example of a mismatched signature that she provided actually came from a 2020 ballot. 

“There’s no sign that the processes were not followed for how signature-matching is supposed to occur,” Muller explained. “It just sort of says the numbers look funny to them and, without more, that’s really hard to demonstrate.” 

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Usually, election suits show evidence of fraud and include testimony from witnesses who describe instances of voter intimidation or provide evidence of stolen ballots. However, Muller says that these are lacking from Lake’s complaint — instead, she focuses on the type of voting machines used and what ballot envelopes looked like.

Muller also believes that Lake’s legal team is not experienced when it comes to election disputes. Her lawyers include Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm, who previously represented Cyber Ninjas in an “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, and D.C. corporate lawyer Kurt Olsen, who attempted to toss out the results of battleground states that Trump lost in 2020. 

The suit starts by citing polling numbers from Rasmussen Reports, which asked voters across the country if they agreed that the Maricopa County election was “botched.” Of those that responded to the poll, 72 percent of likely voters said they agreed with Lake, but her lawyers failed to understand that public opinion has no weight in a case like this. 

“The citation to polling numbers is bizarre,” Barton said. He said that the references to the polling data had more to do with publicity than the outcome of the suit, to which Muller agreed. 

“Some complaints are written to double as press releases,” Muller explained. “You will see complaints, with tone and rhetoric, that are designed to sort of gain public attention.” 

University of Texas Law professor Stephen Vladeck added in an email to the Mirror that Lake’s rhetorical posturing is similar to that of the election lawsuits in 2020. “Unfortunately, it’s become a common tactic among election deniers,” he said. “Fortunately, it hasn’t been a successful one. And I suspect Lake’s lawsuit is heading for a similar fate as all of the 2020 election cases — not succeeding.”

Former federal prosecutor and University of Baltimore law professor Kimberly Wehle also slammed Lake’s “garbage” lawsuit in an article published by The Bulwark, a conservative news outlet. 

“Kari Lake, the loser of the Arizona gubernatorial race, has filed suit in Arizona state court against Katie Hobbs, the governor-elect and current secretary of state, along with a slew of election officials, challenging the election outcome à la the Big Lie 2020,” Wehle writes. “Like Donald Trump before her, Lake is attempting to use the courts to create political soundbites to feed the base — despite an apparent absence of supportive facts or law.”

Wehle adds that Lake has yet to receive traction from the MAGA base, despite using Trump’s tactics from 2020. “Her legal case looks like a loser, too,” Wehle says. “We know this in part because Lake already tried a pre-election lawsuit, back in April.” 

In the April suit, Lake asked a federal court to require that Arizona only use paper ballots for the November election, alleging that electronic machines are more vulnerable to fraud due to hacking. 

“Trouble is, Arizona doesn’t even use the kind of touch-screen system her lawsuit sought to decommission,” Wehle explains. 

Wehle also pointed to how U.S. District Judge John Tuchi sanctioned Lake’s lawyers — including Alan Dershowitz — earlier this month for filing their claims without conducting “the factual and legal pre-filing inquiry that the circumstances of this case reasonably permitted and required.” 

“What the likes of Trump and Lake understand — and what evades non-lawyers — is that litigants can file any sort of garbage to initiate a lawsuit,” she writes. “There’s no automatic gatekeeper at the courthouse door banning bogus cases that have no basis in fact or law.”

Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts also examined Lake’s “desperate and delusional” suit in her Monday column, explaining that the claims were devoid of any substance.

“In a nutshell, her lawsuit is 70 pages of grievance and disbelief, sprinkled with frequent flights of fancy,” she writes. “A lot of woulda couldas about the many ways in which Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials stole Lake’s victory. The only thing missing is any actual evidence that they did.”

Like Muller, Roberts believes that Lake’s attorneys are inexperienced, and writes that the usual group of Republican attorneys that work on election disputes are notably absent from her team.

“It’s easy to spot their handiwork,” Roberts says of the work of Lake’s attorneys in the lawsuit, which includes conspiratorial language and implicates other Arizona Republicans.

“According to the lawsuit, [Governor elect Katie] Hobbs and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer were part of a ‘secret censorship operation’ coordinated by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” she writes, adding that Lake’s lawsuit is “destined” to fail.