Democrat Katie Hobbs took office on Jan. 2 as governor of Arizona, the first Democrat governor of the state since 2009. The private ceremony Monday at the State Capitol will be followed by a public inauguration on Thursday, the Associated Press said. Meanwhile, legal challenges to the shockingly crisis-plagued Arizona midterm election have highlighted the scandals of an election that some argue is illegitimate.
Hobbs also tweeted an excited message Monday: “Thank you, Arizona. As governor, I’ll work toward finding common ground and embracing the challenges that stand before us as opportunities to create real progress.” The tweet showed her swearing-in ceremony.
Thank you, Arizona. As governor, I'll work toward finding common ground and embracing the challenges that stand before us as opportunities to create real progress.
Time to get to work. pic.twitter.com/qlHRLqb4Vl
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) January 2, 2023
The AP claimed that Hobbs won because Republican candidate Kari Lake “struggled to connect with Arizona’s general electorate,” a strange statement considering Lake’s pre-election lead of 11 points in polls (including substantial numbers with independent voters) and Lake’s continuing popularity both in Arizona and nationwide.
It took over a week to count the votes in Arizona after an Election Day with astonishingly widespread printer issues and other irregularities, and Hobbs’s office pressured counties that hesitated to certify the election with a lawsuit and other threats of legal reprisals. Currently unsuccessful lawsuits from Lake and Arizona Republican Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh brought evidence of potentially election-altering irregularities.
During Lake’s election trial, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer testified to an apparent violation of state law on Arizona’s Election Day, while “the number of votes [Maricopa] county reported having counted mysteriously increased by nearly 25,000, a number greater than Katie Hobbs’ alleged 17,000-vote victory.” Despite the judge ruling against Lake, many still question the legitimacy of Hobbs’ election, and Lake is appealing the decision. The judge seemingly acknowledged the irregularities but claimed that they were not intentional misconduct.
Katie Hobbs was Arizona’s Secretary of State during the 2022 election and thus was responsible for overseeing and certifying it. Besides pressuring Arizona counties to certify and ignoring election irregularities in 2022, Hobbs was also implicated in the 2020 election fraud scandal.
Today, Kari Lake supporters retweeted the highlights from her lawsuit:
With a 17k margin between @KariLake and Hobbs, these 3 points should immediately call for a new election to be held in Arizona.
– No chain-of-custody for 300,000 ballots
– Inexplicable injection of 25k ballots
– Thousands of ballots with voters' signatures that don't match the- pic.twitter.com/8TUBpGOJcd— Merissa Hansen🇺🇸 (@merissahansen17) January 1, 2023
Lake has vowed to continue appealing the judge’s decision against her as long as she can, filing a petition on Jan. 1 to take her case to the Arizona Supreme Court. Eight of Lake’s 10 counts were dismissed by the Maricopa County court, and the judge ruled against Lake for the two counts of “Election Day ballot printing issues and procedural errors,” despite what PJ Media’s Matt Margolis called an “overwhelming amount of evidence presented by Kari Lake’s team.” Margolis detailed:
The two-day trial proved that enormous tabulation mistakes happened in elections in Maricopa County, Ariz., because of a change in printer settings on Election Day, which rendered ballots produced with those settings unreadable by the machines. It also revealed evidence of chain of custody problems with the ballots. Affidavits from citizens who were unable to vote because of the chaos on Election Day were also provided.
Unfortunately, with Hobbs now sworn in as Arizona governor, the chance of getting to the bottom of Arizona’s 2022 election is smaller than ever.
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