Maricopa County official sues Kari Lake for defamation over accusations of election irregularities

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer says he's suing former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake for defamation. 

In his lawsuit, Richer, whose office is responsible for maintaining state voter files, claims that Lake falsely accused him of sabotaging the 2022 midterm election by injecting 300,000 illegal ballots into the final vote tally in the county, the most populous in the state.

"Not only would I obviously never do the things that she accuses me of, but also as a matter of Arizona law and election administration processes, I don’t even have responsibility for – or jurisdiction over – the printing of ballots on Election Day," Richer told The Arizona Republic. 

Lake responded to the lawsuit on Twitter. 

"I’m exposing the massive corruption in our elections and this jackass is suing me," she tweeted. "He wants to silence US."

Lake, who has filed a series of lawsuits and appeals over what she believes are voting irregularities that cost her the 2022 race, continued by saying she is not going to stop talking about corrupt elections. 

"Corrupt elections have saddled us with disasters like Biden and Hobbs," she also says in the post. "The majority of Americans KNOW our elections are fraudulent. Those who orchestrated the wide-spread fraud want us to shut-up and accept it."

One of Lake's primary legal arguments, since losing to current Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, is that thousands of Republican voters were disenfranchised on Election Day, when voting machine errors occurred in at least 60% of the voting centers in Maricopa County. She also pointed out major problems with the signature verification process for mail-in ballots.

Lake has vowed to take her election lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.