(FreedomBeacon.com)- Earlier this week, it became apparent according to many media reports that Republican Kari Lake would lose her bid for the governorship in Arizona to her Democratic challenger Katie Hobbs.
Yet, Lake was not so convinced, tweeting Monday night:
“Arizonans know BS when they see it.”
Lake took those comments a step further Thursday as she has declined to concede in the race. Instead of doing that — even though media outlets such as The Associated Press called the election for Hobbs — she said she would be assembling a team of legal experts that’s “collecting evidence and data” regarding the electoral process in Arizona.
In a video that she posted online on Thursday morning, Lake said:
“Rest assured, I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week. I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs.”
Lake, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has been consistently among the election deniers who believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Republicans and Trump.
She stuck to that theme throughout her campaign and even called various election officials in Arizona “incompetent” since the midterm elections were held. On Thursday, she pointed out that there were malfunctions in printing in the most populous county in the state, Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix.
Lake said it was “unforgivable” for these errors to happen, and that voters were being disenfranchised as a result.
Election officials in Arizona said that of the 223 voting centers in the county, 70 of them used printers that produced ballots that had ink that was too light for the tabulation machines to correctly read them.
As a result, voters had to either wait in the line until the issue could be fixed, go to another voting center to cast their ballot, or put the original ballot they filled out into a secure box that could then be sent to the central facility in the county to be tabulated.
This is why Lake believes that there was fraud in the county, which had a big impact in the outcome of the election.
Election officials in Maricopa County have continually denied any wrongdoing and shot down the allegations Lake put forward. They said that no voter was denied their opportunity to cast their vote. Officials also said that the printing issue actually affected less than 7% of ballots on Election Day.
Lake and other GOP groups tried to get in-person voting extended on Election Day. However, an Arizona judge rejected that motion because he said he didn’t see any evidence that one voter wasn’t able to cast their ballot.
In a joint statement that was released last week, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, both Republicans who serve as the chair and vice chair of the county’s Board of Supervisors, respectively, said:
“The good news is election administration has built in redundancies — backup plans when thins don’t go as planned.”
