© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Republican candidate for Arizona Governor Kari Lake speaks at the Republican Party of Arizona’s 2022 U.S. midterm elections night rally in Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S., November 8, 2022. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
By Kanishka Singh and Sneha Bhowmik
(Reuters) -Defeated Republican candidate Kari Lake sued state elections officials on Friday to challenge the counting and certification of the midterm election and ask to be declared the winner.
The suit targets Lake’s opponent, Governor-elect Katie Hobbs, who is currently Arizona’s secretary of state, along with top officials in Maricopa County, according to the filing on Friday with the Maricopa County Superior Court.
Lake was one of the most high-profile Republican candidates in the midterm elections to embrace former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.
The suit on Friday asks for an order declaring that Lake is the winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, or alternatively throwing out the results and requiring the state’s Maricopa county to conduct a new election.
In November, Trump-backed Lake lost the governor’s race to Democrat Hobbs following which she refused to concede and continued making unconfirmed claims about election improprieties on her Twitter feed.
Lake, a former television news anchor, was one of a string of Trump-aligned Republican candidates who lost battleground state races in the midterm elections.
During her campaign, Lake vowed to ban the state’s mail-in voting, which conspiracy theorists falsely claimed was vulnerable to fraud, fuelling distrust among voters about the safety of a voting method used by hundreds of thousands of Americans.
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