Kari Lake addresses defamation lawsuit from AZ elections official.

Arizona Election Official Files Defamation Lawsuit Against GOP Candidate

A top election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, has filed a defamation lawsuit against GOP candidate Kari Lake. In response, Lake has accused him of trying to censor her.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer claims that he has faced “violent vitriol and other dire consequences” due to allegations made by Lake about the 2022 midterm elections. Lake has filed several lawsuits with Arizona state courts, arguing that irregularities and errors during the midterms should make her the winner.

Richer, in an op-ed published in The Arizona Republic, wrote, “Rather than accept political defeat, rather than get a new job, she has sought to undermine confidence in our elections and has mobilized millions of her followers against me.”

Lake, who is openly considering a run for U.S. Senate and is reportedly being considered as a leading contender to be Trump’s running mate in his 2024 presidential campaign, has asserted that Richer and other Maricopa County officials interfered in the election to prevent her from winning the gubernatorial race against Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Richer’s Lawsuit

Richer’s lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, names Lake, her campaign, and her political fundraising group as defendants. In addition to seeking unspecified monetary damages, Richer is requesting a court order declaring Lake’s statements false and requiring her to delete them from social media.

The lawsuit specifically takes issue with two of Lake’s allegations. One claims that Richer intentionally had 19-inch ballot images printed on 20-inch paper, causing counting problems on Election Day. The other claim is that he injected 300,000 fake ballots into the counting process.

“Lake Campaign’s false and defamatory statements accused Richer, of among other things, intentionally sabotaging the 2022 election by intentionally having ballot-on-demand printers print the wrong sized ballots,” he wrote in the suit, adding that her statements also “damaged Richer.”

Lake’s Response

In response, Lake, who has previously vowed to take her election challenges to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary, wrote on her Twitter page that Richer’s lawsuit is an attempt to censor her.

“I’m exposing the massive corruption in our elections and this… is suing me,” Lake wrote on Twitter. “He wants to silence us… corrupt elections have saddled us with disasters like [Joe] Biden and Hobbs.”

Officials who allegedly “orchestrated the wide-spread fraud want us to shut up and accept it,” she added, including a link to a donation website. “We won’t. Our country deserves better.”