Kari Lake, a Republican who was defeated by Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race, had made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign.
A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.
The order by Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald. J. Trump.
Ms. Lake and her supporters conjured up what they called a deliberate effort by election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, to disenfranchise her voters. But they never provided evidence of such intentional malfeasance, nor even evidence that any voters had been disenfranchised.
Ms. Lake has said she would appeal an unfavorable decision.
Ms. Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor, lost by around 17,000 votes to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is the Arizona secretary of state, and who rose to national prominence when she resisted efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the vote in 2020.
Ms. Lake’s legal challenge, brought against Maricopa County and Ms. Hobbs, was a rallying point for the election denial movement that grew out of Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat. Since Election Day, Ms. Lake has appeared twice alongside the former president at his Mar-a-Lago resort, vowing to fight on.
The verdict deals a blow to that movement’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2022 election. Republican candidates running on Mr. Trump’s false claims lost important races in battleground states and, according to postelection polls, generated an increase in confidence in the election system among both Democrats and Republicans.
According to Democracy Docket, a left-leaning election law group founded by the Democratic campaign lawyer Marc Elias, 15 lawsuits have been brought by candidates or their campaigns over federal, statewide and legislative races since this year’s election — a steep drop from the 36 filed in 2020, 16 of them on behalf of Mr. Trump and his campaign and more by his allies.
The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Some of the lawyers involved in those cases, such as Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, were later punished by courts for “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” and “demonstrably false and misleading statements,” over the often conspiratorial and blatantly false claims they made in and out of court on behalf of Mr. Trump.