Arizona Republican Kari Lake is launching a grassroots “ballot-chasing” operation to boost Republican turnout in future Arizona elections and “paint the state red.”
“We’re going to start rolling up our sleeves and playing by the same rules [Democrats] play by,” Lake said while surrounded by supporters at a May 23 press conference in Phoenix.
“And when you get a fed-up mom who plays by those rules, watch out, because we’re not letting this happen again,” she added.
Noting that nearly 90 percent of Arizona voters are on the permanent early voter list, Lake explained that her team, led by Strong Communities Action Chairwoman Merissa Hamilton, would be doing everything in their power to sway those voters and “take back” Arizona.
“If we’ve got to work in their rigged system, we’ll work in their rigged system,” she said.
As part of the new initiative, Lake said volunteers would be ramping up their door-knocking and voter registration efforts and assisting voters with getting to the polls.
“We are going to contact every voter, make sure that if they have a ballot sitting on their counter, we help them get that ballot to where it needs to go,” she said.
“And we’re going to register … everybody we can to vote, and we’re going to turn our state around. We’re going to take it back because this government belongs to ‘we the people.’”
Lake’s new operation comes on the heels of an Arizona judge’s May 22 decision to toss her lawsuit challenging the results of the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election, which she maintains she rightfully won.
Lake’s initial lawsuit cited several election administration problems in Maricopa County as evidence that the election was fixed, including misprinted ballots, the comingling of counted and uncounted ballots, and a lack of proper signature verification for mail-in ballots.
Although the candidate’s claims were rejected by the lower courts, the Arizona Supreme Court revived a portion of her case in March, finding that the Court of Appeals had erred in its dismissal of her signature verification claims.
Among the claims Lake’s legal team made in arguing her case was that the signatures on hundreds of thousands of Maricopa County ballots were reviewed in less than three seconds by election workers—a fact she said proved they were not properly verified.
“It takes a full second for the ballot image to pop up on the screen,” she noted at her press conference, adding that some workers were approved to verify signatures remotely without any observers present.
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