Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawyer, Kurt Olsen, said that Maricopa County did not have a few bad signatures on mail-in ballots in November’s election, but an entire “systemic failure.” Wednesday night, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed most of the trial court’s and the Arizona Court of Appeals’ rulings in favor of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County, but did remand one of Lake’s claims — that signature verification laws for mail-in ballots were not followed by the county in 2022 — to the trial court for consideration. The trial court had ruled in December that Lake had been too late in bringing up her claim that the county was not following proper procedures to ensure the identity of voters. She should have brought that up before the election, according to that decision. That judge cited the doctrine of laches, which requires plaintiffs to assert rights in a timely manner, or they are barred from legal remedy. However, in this week’s ruling, the Arizona Supreme Court disagreed. “Contrary to the ruling of the trial court and the Court of Appeals Opinion, this signature verification challenge is to the application of the policies, not to the policies themselves. Therefore, it was erroneous to dismiss this claim under the doctrine of laches because Lake could not have brought this challenge before the election.”
