Kari Lake on absentee voting: It's election day, not election month
"Two thousand mail-in ballots were accepted by Maricopa County after Election Day in 2020. After Election Day," the Arizona gubernatorial candidate said.
Kari Lake, Arizona's Republican nominee for governor, interviewed with journalist Jonathan Karl on ABC. The network did not air the entire interview, but it showed an excerpt in which Karl confronts Lake about the doubts she has expressed regarding the 2020 election.
Arizona's secretary of state is the one charge of making sure that elections run smoothly. The person who held this position during the 2020 elections was none other than Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs.
The interview wrapped in commentary
Karl was not happy with Lake's responses in the interview. In fact, the clip of the interview that was shared by ABC begins with a comment from the journalist himself criticizing the Republican candidate.
During the interview, the ABC reporter makes every effort to achieve two goals. The first was to get Kari Lake to say whether or not she thought the 2020 election was fraudulent. The second was to get her to say in advance that she will accept the results of the 2022 election, regardless of whether or not there is vote rigging. Lake did neither.
2020 elections
In one part of the interview, the journalist asks Lake about the position of other Republicans regarding the 2020 election:
No chain of custody
Karl then focuses on a particular issue:
The reporter referred to a report in which Maricopa County officials stated that they indeed had control of those ballots throughout, so the chain of custody was not broken.
Mail-in ballots
Another of the issues the journalist discussed with Lake is absentee voting. Lake believes that voting by mail is more prone to fraud because it is easier to prevent against illegal voting at the physical polling place.
The additional facts that Lake wanted to share do not appear in the edited ABC interview.
Predicting there will be no fraud
Karl was persistent in trying to get Kari Lake to say in advance that she will accept the results of the November election, no matter what. He tries to assure that there will not be any type of fraud or irregularity.
Lake's response, to the journalist's chagrin, is that she will accept the election result only if it is fair. However, she cannot foresee the future and consequently cannot anticipate that there will be no irregularities of any kind. This is the exchange between the two: