Kari Lake Is Too Reckless to Run for Office Again

Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake now has a criminal referral against her for tweeting photos of actual voter signatures.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — a Democrat — wrote in his referral, “The protections afforded by this subsection prohibit posting any information derived from voter registration forms or precinct registers to the internet, and under no circumstance may a person other than the voter or [a] statutorily authorized person reproduce a voter’s signature.”

Fontes referred Lake for the class 6 felony — the least severe category, typically with sentences between four months and two years if found guilty — for this tweet sent on January 23.

I’ve posted a screencap and blacked out the signatures to avoid going afoul of Arizona law. My wife and I are planning on visiting my friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser in Tucson, and we’d rather not have any trouble.

Before we get to the meat of the matter, a couple of observations.

Lake would also have been a much better governor than Hobbs, with views and policies much more in line with Arizona voters.

Lake is absolutely correct to pursue every legal avenue available for looking into what went on in Maricopa County on election day and after. It’s obvious to anyone with open eyes that things were not on the up and up. At the very, very least, there needs to be some kind of accounting for why Lake’s election opponent, now-governor Katie Hobbs, was not forced to recuse her responsibilities as Secretary of State, overseeing an election she was running in.

A good first step toward restoring faith in elections — and neither Left nor Right has much faith left — is disallowing contestants from also being arbiters. What happened in Arizona last year is like allowing batters to call their own balls and strikes.

I don’t believe for one moment that Lake published those signatures with any malice, or that doing so is worth any jail time. Or even a prosecution, for that matter.

But Lake’s state is effectively controlled by Democrats for the time being. What the hell was she thinking, setting herself up like that?

Good Lord, was Lake reckless. And not for the first time.

Regardless of whether the election was stolen from her, the fact is that Lake underperformed the other Republicans running for statewide office. The reason: She recklessly insulted Arizona Republican voters right before the election.

Arizona’s own Jon Gabriel reported in November that Lake said at a campaign rally: “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Alright, get the hell out… Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”

Whatever you or I might think of John McCain, he’s still beloved by many in Arizona. “They don’t make up the majority of the party – not by a long shot,” Gabriel wrote. “But they exceed that single percentage point Lake needed to best Hobbs.”

It was a reckless, clueless thing to say — and might have cost Lake the election even if everything in Maricopa had been completely above reproach.

And now she’s set herself up for a possible prosecution by a state government controlled by the opposition that she, herself, also helped set up.

I personally like Kari Lake, particularly for her brassiness. But that brassiness has crossed over the line into recklessness twice now, and I don’t see how Arizona Republicans can trust her as their standard-bearer again.

Recommended: We Need to Talk About That Trans Figure Skater