Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson on Wednesday ordered Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to pay $33,040.50 in legal fees to Arizona Democrat Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, most of which stems from compensation for Hobbs serving as an expert witness.
According to CNN, Hobbs — the current secretary of state — and her legal team sought, in addition to compensation, to charge Lake and her lawyers with sanctions over their claims of fraught election integrity. But Thompson disagreed. "The Court finds," Thompson wrote on Tuesday, "that Plaintiff's claims presented in this litigation were not groundless and brought in bad faith. Any legal decision must be based on the law and facts rather than subjective beliefs or partisan opinions, no matter how strongly they are held."
Earlier in his opinion, Thompson noted that Lake was unsuccessful in proving a case of wrongdoing on behalf of Hobbs.
"At the hearing," the judge wrote, "Plaintiff was not successful in eliciting from any Defendant admissions of intentional malfeasance aimed at altering the Election outcome. However, she did produce testimony of an expert, which ultimately was not accepted by the Court, but who did argue that intentional malfeasance was the root cause of tabulator malfunctions on Election Day. Plaintiff also presented statistical analysis based on 220 Affidavits of voters who did vote but reported frustrations with tabulator malfunctions and the lines on Election Day."
While reports of long lines could not be attributable in court to misconduct, according to a report from AZCentral about the 2016 general election, five-hour wait times to vote are just a fact of elections in Arionza's largest county: Maricopa.
Lake lost to Hobbs by roughly 17,000 votes. Her lawyers intend to appeal the ruling. They claim up to 29,000 Republican voters struggled to cast their vote due to printer failures or long lines.
According to The Federalist, Maricopa's 2022 midterm "election was a bigger disaster than people realize." Following the election, executive director of the Election Integrity Network, Marshall Yates, said that after he sent out a survey to Arizona poll workers, they responded saying they had "zero" confidence in the election.
"As soon as we sent the survey out," Yates said, "we were flooded with responses showing that they had no confidence in how the election had been run there."
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