Lake was endorsed by President Donald Trump and was one of the most prominent candidates running in the November elections to promote his conspiracy that the 2020 election was illegitimate and that election fraud is rampant, including in Arizona. Lake sits on the far right of the GOP’s platform and courted the votes of hard-line conservatives in Arizona with inflammatory rhetoric.
She lost to Hobbs, a Democrat and the Arizona secretary of state, by more than 17,000 votes last month. But she has since refused to accept the results of the election, claiming that Republican voters were disenfranchised and repeating a number of debunked or misconstrued claims about the voting process.
That refusal culminated in a lawsuit that alleged intentional vote-fixing and claimed that there were efforts to change printer settings and modify the chain of custody for ballots in Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona.
Thompson dismissed eight of the 10 complaints in the lawsuit outright but allowed a two-day trial for Lake’s legal team to make a case for the remaining two, which involved the printers and chain of custody. Following the trial, Thompson on Christmas Eve rejected the remaining complaints as well.
Lawyers for Maricopa County argued that Lake’s lawyers knew their complaints could not be substantiated and brought the lawsuit in bad faith in violation of ethics rules, but Thompson did not make such a finding and chose not to sanction Lake’s team. He did, however, order Lake on Tuesday to pay more than $33,000 for Hobbs’ legal fees.
Following Thompson’s Dec. 24 ruling, Lake tweeted and then deleted a statement alleging that the ruling was “ghostwritten” by Democratic attorneys.
