Washington
CNN
—
As she contemplates a run for the US Senate, Republican Kari Lake continues to make false claims about her loss in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election.
Lake’s speech at a Sunday rally in Scottsdale highlighted the serial election dishonesty that has been a central feature of her campaign rhetoric. Among other things, she claimed that:
• The 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. (Trump lost fair and square; his baseless “stolen” claims have been dismissed not only by the courts but by numerous officials who worked in his administration and on his campaign.)
• The 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election was stolen from her. (Lake lost by more than 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs, in large part because people who voted for Republican candidates in other races on the ballot didn’t vote for Lake.)
• The Republicans who serve as the top election officials in Phoenix-area Maricopa County intentionally caused technical problems at Election Day voting locations to hurt her chances. (There is no evidence the problems were caused by deliberate malfeasance, as a judge found in rejecting Lake’s legal challenge.)
• Hobbs is an illegitimate “squatter” in the governor’s office. (Hobbs’ win was certified in December by outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey and outgoing state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, both Republicans, as well as Republican-appointed Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel. Lake then lost the court challenge in which she tried to overturn her defeat.)
We won’t devote additional space to fact-checking this vague conspiracy bunk. But as Lake continues to pursue a legal appeal, we will break down a specific new claim that she framed Sunday as one of her “big bombshells.” It is nothing of the sort.
One Lake’s most dramatic claims at the rally was this: “Our experts actually testified, with 99.999% accuracy and certainty, that a minimum of 140,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots with bad signatures were counted in our election. It’s outrageous. Bogus signatures.”
Facts First: Lake’s claim is false. She exaggerated the findings of a right-wing group’s highly flawed analysis. First, the analysis did not even look at any ballots or signatures from the 2022 election. The academic who came up with the “99.999%” figure made clear that it was merely a “projection” based on the right-wing group’s conclusions about what happened in Maricopa County in the 2020 election. Second, those conclusions about 2020 are suspect: The group does not have access to all of the past signatures that Maricopa County uses in its signature verification process, so it cannot credibly say how many signatures weren’t a match. Third, even a truly mismatched signature is not itself proof that a mail-in ballot is “fraudulent” or that the signature is “bogus.” Legitimate voters’ signatures often vary over time for all kinds of benign reasons.
The election denial movement is sometimes a top-down ecosystem in which citizens come to believe the falsehood-filled rhetoric of failed candidates like Lake and Trump. But this Lake claim is an example of how the movement also works the other way, with citizens coming up with faulty findings that make their way into the candidates’ speeches.
Let’s walk through the three big problems with Lake’s claim.
The underlying analysis is flawed
Lake’s claim is based on the flawed findings of a right-wing group called We the People AZ Alliance, which, like Lake, has claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
At a hearing held last week by the Arizona state Senate’s elections committee, the group’s co-founder and chairman, Shelby Busch, testified…
Read More: Fact check: Kari Lake’s continuing false Arizona election claims