One America News Network is throwing its support behind a failed gubernatorial candidate’s anti-democratic ploy to seize control of Arizona. Kari Lake, who was narrowly defeated last month by current secretary of state Katie Hobbs, is suing the governor-elect as well as Maricopa County election officials in order to either declare Lake the winner or force the county to hold a new election.
Lake’s desperate gambit, which claims that “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election,” is straight from the fever swamps of right-wing media like OAN. Prior to the midterms, OAN chummed the waters for months with claims of illegal voter registrations and other conspiracy theories that would set the stage for Lake’s claim of “illegal ballots.” And Lake herself made dozens of campaign appearances on OAN, often spreading claims of election fraud. It only follows that the deeply deranged network would give the Lake campaign’s last breath as much oxygen as possible.
The day Lake filed her lawsuit, OAN’s Daniel Baldwin reported that “Kari Lake just fulfilled another promise of hers” and that “the country’s been waiting for this.” Baldwin’s guest, Trump campaign attorney Christina Bobb, returned to her OAN roots by pushing election denial.
“Everyone in America is looking at Maricopa County going, how could you mess up your elections so badly? And so clearly in such a partisan way that benefits the secretary of state Democrat candidate, who basically announced herself governor after completely botching the election?”
After Lake’s announcement, OAN continued filling the role of obsequious hype man for the lawsuit. Baldwin interviewed Turning Point USA’s Tyler Bowyer (also a member of the Republican National Committee), who breathlessly claimed that Lake’s lawsuit “is setting the precedent for the Western world. … I appreciate Kari because she is fighting this. The Republican Party is going to fight this.” Baldwin also interviewed Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers, another die-hard election denier, who predicted that the case would go to the Arizona Supreme Court.
On December 13, Real America host Dan Ball summed up Lake’s lawsuit and claimed that “never in U.S. history has there been this much evidence compiled before the election, and now after, to show you, something stinks in Denmark,” a misquote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Appearing again, Bobb declared that Lake’s case is “extremely strong” and projected her hopes that the will of Arizona voters would be overturned. At the end of the interview, Ball posed a hypothetical to Bobb, tugging at election deniers’ greatest dreams:
“Kari wins this one, becomes governor, but it proves that Arizona is screwed. Does Trump have any legal standing to go back and go, ‘This is the same system they screwed me at in 2020?’ Just a question. Yes or no,” Ball asked, giggling.
“It’ll be interesting. I don’t know. I mean, one state, as we know; we would need three states,” Bobb replied, referencing Trump’s 2020 electoral deficit, “so I wouldn’t necessarily say right away. Certainly maybe down the road, but I would expect Gov. Lake to clean up the process.”
“Oh I’m sure she will once she wins this one,” Ball said, “because I still think she’s the rightful winner.”
After several other Republican candidates lost close elections and did not falsely cry election fraud, some pundits began to question whether it was falling out of fashion. But the phenomenon popularly called election denial has deep roots in conservatives’ decades-old complaints of dead people voting and other baseless or overhyped worries that, according to one Missouri election official in 2011, are “code for Black people.”
The terminology may have evolved, but conservatives lying about elections is an old scourge. After Trump’s deadly attempt to seize power, Kari Lake has now taken up the anti-democratic torch to pursue her goal of stealing the Arizona governor’s mansion. And OAN will likely be with her for as long as she tries.
