Lake Can’t Fit All Her (New) Complaints Into Her Election Contest Reply Brief

Kari Lake’s attorneys have so much to say about the dismissal of her Election Contest, they are asking for an exception to the word count in their newly-filed Reply Brief. Surprisingly, they are also (just now) again asking the Arizona Supreme Court to grab the appeal from the intermediate level Court of Appeals.

Her raft of late night filings to both courts can be reviewed here.

Asking to file a longer Brief than permitted by court rules is not unusual for complex cases. Lake’s attorneys note that the Answering Briefs filed by the multiple defendants exceeded the 14,000 words each was permitted on their own, so Lake should be able to file 8,350 words – more than the 7,000 permitted in a Reply.

More surprisingly, Lake waited until last night to again ask the Arizona Supreme Court to consider her appeal(s) immediately. This is the 2nd time they have asked, and neither has been done as immediately as possible and warranted in a truly emergency election appeal. Without dissent, the Supreme Court rejected the previous effort, although part of that was because the Justices noted the two different appeals which the attorneys had filed.

We have previously analyzed how this appeal likely would have been decided by the Arizona Supreme Court in the first week of Janauary if Lake’s legal team followed court rules and longstanding best practices on election cases.

Briefly, although Lake filed a Notice of Appeal shortly after the Superior Court case went against them early in the last week of December, they should have brought it to the appellate courts for expedited treatment that week. Instead, they waited until the long holiday weekend and inappropriately filed a 2nd appeal (the “Special Action”) with the Court of Appeals. This delayed and confused things after New Year’s, and helped prompt the Supreme Court to decline to grab it (i.e. choose to transfer it from the Court of Appeals to decide it more quickly).

Although we will review the Reply Brief more fully, it appears Lake is rehashing the laundry list previously presented of how Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson and defendants’ attorneys just do not realize how bad the election was and all of the errors they made in the trial.

The three judge panel is slated to conference the case on Feb. 1. Because none of the parties asked for it, it is less likely the court will set a public oral argument on the case. And, we are not sure how quickly the Arizona Supreme Court will rule on this renewed motion for transfer.