October 24, 2022

Arizona Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake was caught lying several times on ABC's This Week when host Karl fact-checked her usual voter fraud lies.

Karl spent a lot of time going over many of Lake's fraudulent claims and asked if she would concede if she lost the election, as well as if she would try then to limit all types of mail-in and early voting if she won.

Transcript via ABC:

KARL (on camera): My question is, whether or not you would limit mail-in voting, limit early voting, given that so many people in this state, it’s like 90 percent, vote early in this state or use early ballots.

LAKE: We want to shore up our elections, so they are very honest. And every voter knows that it’s an honest system.

Let me just give you a couple of facts.

KARL: Yes.

LAKE: Two thousand mail-in ballots were accepted by Maricopa County after Election Day in 2020. After Election Day.

KARL (voice over): That was a new one on us. So, we took the claim to election officials in Maricopa County, who told us it's just not true. In fact, no ballots were accepted after the election day, 7:00 p.m. deadline.

Some ballots were scanned the next morning, giving them a time stamp after Election Day. But, again, those ballots were turned in on Election Day by the deadline.

It's too bad Karl and ABC didn't research Lake well enough to confront her live, but at least they did call her out and edited it into the interview.

Here's a rule of thumb on Lake: any voter fraud claim she makes is absurd and a lie.

KARL: You said something last week. You said that there were 740,000 ballots with no chain of custody; those ballots shouldn't have been counted. Are you really saying that you would throw out the ballots of 740,000, nearly three-quarters of a million Arizonans?

I mean, those were -- those were ballots.

LAKE: Seven hundred forty-thousand ballots violated chain of custody requirements in Maricopa County.

KARL: In -- I mean, first of all, it's -- it's not true. I mean, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors put out a 98-page report that went through these allegations.

LAKE: OK, that is a fact. That is a fact. Check your facts.

KARL (voice-over): We took that claim to Maricopa County officials, who refuted Lake and pointed to the statement they issued back in May, saying that the county always had control of the ballots, adding, they, quote, "were sealed in envelopes and secured in boxes that bipartisan couriers are prohibited from opening."

KARL (on camera): But just to be clear, the Republicans on the Board of Supervisors, the Republican governor, now the Republican candidate for Senate running along with you, the Republican attorney general under -- under Donald Trump, Bill Barr, all said that there -- that there wasn't -- you know, that the election was -- was not stolen.

None of Kari Lake's complaints can come close to meeting the "smell test."

Many states made voting a little easier because of a f**king pandemic.

It doesn't matter what the evidence says. What the experts say or what Republicans say that are in power that disprove this garbage.

Lake and her MAGA ilk will just repeat their lies over and over again.

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