A defamation lawsuit that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed against Kari Lake is being allowed to proceed, despite the fact Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law First Amendment Clinic joined Lake in her defense requesting that the lawsuit be dismissed. Richer’s lawsuit, which is being paid for by the Protect Democracy Project, accused Lake of falsely stating that he intentionally sabotaged the election. Approximately 300,000 ballots in the 2022 election lacked a chain of custody, a class 2 misdemeanor, but the county has strenuously fought litigation efforts to allow Lake to inspect the ballot affidavit envelopes and other requests from her and voter integrity groups related to the election anomalies.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jay Adleman, who heard oral arguments on Lake’s Motion to Dismiss on December 19, issued his ruling denying the motion that same day. He indicated he already found Lake guilty without putting on a trial first. “In the Court’s view, Defendant Lake’s statements are ‘provably false’ under prevailing Arizona law,” he said.
Adleman noted that it is a high bar to obtain a dismissal. He said, “Dismissal is permitted only when a ‘plaintiff[] would not be entitled to relief under any interpretation of the facts susceptible of proof,’” and “a motion to dismiss requires the trial court to accept all material facts alleged by the nonmoving party as true.”
He said Richer offered two “well pled factual allegations” to support his lawsuit. First, he cited Richer’s assertion that the recorder’s office is not responsible for Election Day operations. However, although the Maricopa County Supervisors are statutorily obligated to oversee Election Day operations, the recorder is statutorily obligated to oversee mail-in ballots, which includes the 300,000 ballots Lake referred to. Additionally, Richer testified in court during Lake’s election contest trials regarding Election Day proceedings. For example, he said when ballots leave the voting centers in the bins, they are not counted so no one knows how many there are.
Second, Adleman said “the independent report overseen by former Chief Justice Ruth McGregor did not find any evidence of intentional misconduct involving Election Day ballots.” That report was inconclusive about the cause of the printer issues on Election Day. Jennifer Wright, who was the Election Integrity Unit civil attorney for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office during the election and who performed her own investigation of Maricopa County’s election problems going back to the 2020 presidential election, told The Arizona Sun Times the report was “meaningless” since it did not include an analysis of the printer logs.
Wright said the investigation never attempted to determine why the problems happened, instead merely confirming that there were problems. She posted on X, “It seems to ‘exonerate’ MC without determining the ROOT cause of failure.”
