By Howard Fischer
Mail | Twitter: @azcapmedia

PHOENIX — Kari Lake isn’t going to get to jump the line in her bid to overturn her loss of the gubernatorial race to Katie Hobbs.

In a brief order Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected the request of the failed Republican candidate to immediately take up her appeal of a lower court ruling that went against her. The justices did not give any reason other than to say there was “no good cause” to let her skip the normal process of first taking the case to the Court of Appeals.

The order came despite Lake’s pleading that a quick resolution of her complaints is necessary, not only to resolve her claim of “extraordinary new evidence” to show that she actually outpolled Hobbs but also that immediate high court intervention was necessary to deal with “election maladministration” ahead of the 2024 election — an election in which Lake has hinted she might run for U.S. Senate.

There was no immediate response from Lake.

But her request had drawn skepticism from attorneys for Maricopa County, whose election procedures she has continued to challenge.

On one hand, Deputy County Attorney Joseph La Rue said bypassing the appellate court might make sense given that, whatever that court ruled, the case eventually would wind up before the Supreme Court. He said expediting the process — one the county thinks ultimately will end all of Lake’s litigation — would promote “judicial economy and finality in elections.”

Now, the case remains on track, with Lake scheduled to file her opening briefs at the appellate court by Sept. 15. Then attorneys for Maricopa County and Hobbs get to respond before a ruling — one, as La Rue noted, will be appealed to the Supreme Court, potentially dragging the issue into 2024.

But La Rue also cautioned the justices that Lake was improperly trying to once again raise claims that they already rejected. And that, he said, is not the only problem.

“Most of the factual allegations in the petition are demonstrably false and misrepresentations of the record,” La Rue said. And he reminded the justice that this is a “recurring problem,” citing the fact that they fined Lake’s attorneys $2,000 in May in a related appeal for repeatedly lying to them.

The pending appeal is all that’s left of a laundry list of allegations in a lawsuit Lake filed in December challenging the official results which showed her losing to Hobbs by 17,117 votes.

That included claims that someone in Maricopa County intentionally altered printers at voting centers so they would produce ballots that could not be automatically read by on-site tabulators. Closely related were complaints of long lines on Election Day that deterred some people from voting.

Both were tied to the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to vote in person and that Lake outpolled Hobbs among those Election Day votes. She charged that these actions illegally deprived her of votes that would have altered the outcome of the gubernatorial race.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled and the Court of Appeals affirmed that Lake had failed to present “clear and convincing evidence” to back her claims. That included failing to show that anyone actually was denied the right to vote.

All that was upheld by the Supreme Court.

But the justices said that Lake should be given a chance to argue that the county did not follow proper procedures in verifying signatures on early ballots and did not maintain the proper “chain of custody” of those ballots.

In a new trial, Thompson ruled that Lake failed to provide evidence of misconduct in the way Maricopa County verified the signatures on early ballots. Now, Lake told the Supreme Court, she wants that conclusion overturned.

“Maricopa reviewers compared and verified voter signatures under (the law) at humanly impossible speeds,” she argued. “More than 70,000 voter signatures were supposedly ‘compared’ and ‘verified’ in under two seconds each, and more than 276,000 signatures took less than three seconds each.”

Thompson, in his ruling, called all of those numbers legally irrelevant.

“There is no statutory or regulatory requirement that a specific amount of time be applied to review any given signature at any level of review,” Thompson said.

“Not one second, not three seconds and not six seconds: no standard appears in the plain text of the statute,” the judge said. “No reviewer is required by statute or the Elections Procedures Manual to spend any specific length of time on any particular signature.”

Thompson also brushed aside a parallel argument that what the reviewers were doing hardly meets the legal requirement to “compare” signatures.

He said the statutes simply require those doing verification to “make some determination as to whether the signature is consistent or inconsistent with the voter’s record.”

“The court find that looking at signatures that, by and large, have consistent characteristics will require only a cursory examination and thus take very little time,” the judge said.

And there’s one more thing.

Thompson points out that Arizona law requires only that the signatures be consistent to the satisfaction of the county recorder or other designee.

“This, not the satisfaction of the court, the satisfaction of a challenger, or the satisfaction of any other reviewing authority is the determinative quality for whether signature verification occurred,” the judge said. “It would be a violation of the constitutional separation of powers for this court, after the recorder has made a comparison to insert itself into the process and reweigh whether a signature is consistent or inconsistent.”

Lake’s petition to the high court also claimed ballots were misconfigured at 127 vote centers, where printers produced ballots that could not be read by on-site tabulators. And Lake said her claims of problems with printers was backed by post-election report done for the county by former Chief Justice Ruth McGregor.

Thompson already ruled that claim “is 180 degrees from what the report actually says.”

The trial judge also has said that no one was disenfranchised even if ballots were misconfigured and could not be tabulated at vote centers. Thompson said they had the option of placing their voted ballots into a sealed drawer to be counted later at the county’s election offices.

She also claims the county did not perform required “logic and accuracy” testing of tabulators, problems with reformatted memory cards and use of software that was not certified for Arizona.