Trump Demands Kari Lake Be Made Arizona Governor After Her Defeat

Lake, a 2020 election denier, has refused to concede in the state’s gubernatorial race.
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Former President Donald Trump called for defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to be named victor and appointed governor on Monday while repeating baseless voting fraud conspiracies that he has similarly used to contest his own 2020 defeat.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, claimed without supporting evidence that the former TV news anchor-turned politician was a victim of “another criminal voting operation” and that her Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, “ran the election.”

“Massive numbers of ‘BROKEN’ voting machines in Republican Districts on Election Day. Mechanics sent in to ‘FIX’ them made them worse. Kari had to be taken to a Democrat area, which was working perfectly, to vote,” he wrote. “Kari Lake should be installed Governor of Arizona.”

Lake previously said that she chose to vote in a “liberal” district in downtown Phoenix on Election Day “because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines.” She did not suggest that this decision was based on her encountering malfunctioning machines.

Then-Arizona Republican Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake embraces former President Donald Trump during a rally in Mesa, Arizona, in October.
Then-Arizona Republican Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake embraces former President Donald Trump during a rally in Mesa, Arizona, in October.
via Associated Press

Lake has refused to admit defeat to Hobbs and last week she filed a public records lawsuit against Arizona’s Maricopa County that demanded documents related to the election.

This lawsuit follows Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, reporting some issues involving printers at roughly 20% of its voting locations.

Local officials said the printing issues did not prevent anyone from voting. It also was not exclusively in either Republican or Democratic voting districts as claimed by Trump and other Republicans, according to analysis of the locations by the Associated Press and The Washington Post. Both outlets also found that some voting locations that reported issues were in precincts that skewed heavily Democratic.

Lake, since announcing her political run, has publicly presented herself as an election conspiracy theorist and a 2020 election denier ― insisting that Trump fairly won his reelection campaign against President Joe Biden and that electronic voting machines can’t be fully trusted.

In August, she filed a lawsuit ahead of the midterms that requested a hand count of all ballots. That lawsuit, which was filed with the then-Republican nominee for secretary of state, who also lost his race last month, was dismissed by a federal judge who said it failed to show any realistic likelihood of harm from using the machines.

Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors, which is controlled 4-1 by Republicans, will vote to certify the election’s results on Monday. The state certification is set for Dec. 5.

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