“The 2022 election was irredeemably flawed,” Jennifer Wright, one of Lake’s attorneys, wrote in the appeal. “Without this Court’s intervention, future elections remain threatened.”
Lake is widely seen as the front-runner in the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate this year, where she faces Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb. The winner will face Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego in November.
A day after the appeal was filed, two left-leaning groups filed ethical complaints with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission and the District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel against one of her other attorneys, Kurt Olsen, for spreading election lies and violating ethical standards for attorneys.
Olsen, a Washington D.C. employment attorney, already faces discipline in Arizona for lying to the state Supreme Court when he and Scottsdale divorce lawyer Bryan Blehm falsely claimed on Lake’s behalf that it was an “undisputed fact” that 35,000 illegal ballots were included in Maricopa County’s final vote count in 2022.
The new complaint, filed by States United Democracy Center and Lawyers Defending American Democracy, calls out Olsen for his part representing Lake in her election challenges as well as his participation in Texas v. Pennsylvania, the suit that aimed to stop several states from certifying their votes following the 2020 election.
Lake, who lost the gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, has been unsuccessfully fighting the results of that election in court ever since.
Olsen and Bryan Blehm have both been sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making false statements about the illegal ballots, and in June, a Supreme Court panel ruled to suspend Blehm’s law license for 60 days, beginning July 7. Because he is licensed in Maryland, and not Arizona, at most Olsen will face a formal reprimand.
Try, try again
In the appeal filed on Thursday, Lake rehashes many of the same claims that have already failed in the trial and appeals courts, including that in 2022 Maricopa County didn’t conduct the logic and accuracy tests on its ballot tabulators that are required by law.
Maricopa County has repeatedly denied this, but Lake accused county officials of lying to the courts about it.
The presumptive GOP Senate nominee claims that Maricopa County’s tabulators failed “on a massive scale.” While tabulators at polling places did reject around 16,000 ballots on Election Day 2022, all of them were later counted.
Wright, Lake’s attorney, wrote that if logic and accuracy testing would have been conducted properly, the issues with the tabulators on Election Day would not have occurred.
She also repeats the claim that failed in Lake’s second trial in May 2023, that the people comparing voter signatures on early and mail-in ballot envelopes approved them too quickly to have actually completed any true signature verification.
“Lake objected to the 275,000+ ballots that — based on keystroke evidence — Maricopa verified in under three seconds, too quickly to compare signatures,” Wright wrote.
But when Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson issued his ruling following the trial, he pointed out that state statute doesn’t require that signatures are studied for a certain length of time, only that they are compared.
The Arizona Court of Appeals earlier this year upheld Thompson’s rulings in the May 2023 trial. The panel of judges had to repeatedly remind Olsen when he made arguments before them on May 2 that the function of appellate courts is to determine if the trial judge made mistakes in interpreting and applying the law, not to determine the facts of the case.
In the appeal, Lake asks the Arizona Supreme Court to either invalidate the results of the 2022 election or throw out the 275,000 ballots that she claims did not undergo signature verification and declare her the winner.
In the newly filed ethics complaint against Olsen, States United and LDAD call for a “swift investigation into Olsen’s misconduct” and “immediate interim discipline due to the risk his ongoing pattern of unethical behavior poses to the public.”
“Kurt Olsen has abused his law license to spread lies about our elections in the courtroom time and time again, and his pattern of unethical conduct shows he’s not going to stop,” Gillian Feiner, senior counsel at the States United Democracy Center, said in a statement. “Olsen must be held accountable for his professional misconduct, to protect the public, the courts, and our democracy from any further damage he could cause throughout this year’s election and beyond.”
This story was first published by Arizona Mirror, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
