Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said that she is planning a larger legal challenge than the one that her team filed against Maricopa County earlier this week.
“So we filed this lawsuit in court today asking the county to cough up some of the public documentation we need for our bigger lawsuit,” she told Just the News Wednesday. Lake added that she has not determined what the remedy of the lawsuit would be.
“Many people are saying they want a redo of Maricopa County. I’ve heard people say throw it out. We have not determined what the remedy is. But I don’t think you can fix what happened,” she said.
Lake, a Republican backed by former President Donald Trump, criticized how the County ran the election, saying “there were three-hour lines” in part caused by problems with the tabulation equipment at polling locations, in an interview with Newsmax. Earlier this week, Lake’s team filed a lawsuit (pdf) against Maricopa County that called for the release of the country’s election records.
“We have a case that we’re putting together that I believe is going to be shocking,” Lake, a former local television host, said of the lawsuit. “We have whistleblowers coming forward. We have inside information about how this was run, what was going on behind the scenes. What they did to our sacred vote is unforgivable.”
Authorities in Maricopa County on Nov. 8 confirmed that tabulators in numerous polling locations had problems and told voters they had the option to leave their completed ballots in drop-boxes for later counting or to go to a different voting site. Later that day, those officials—Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer—said they identified the printer problem and claimed that no voters were disenfranchised.
“People were still able to vote, it was just a matter of maybe not voting in the way they wanted to,” Gates said in a news conference on Nov. 8. “We do not believe that anyone has been disenfranchised, because no one has been turned away.”
Last week, Democrat Katie Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state, declared victory over Lake. Election data show that she is currently head in the race, although Lake has not conceded.
Requests
Arizona’s Attorney General’s office also issued a letter to Maricopa County and requested answers for problems relating to Election Day.
“These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa County’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law,” the letter stated.
The office requested the information before Maricopa County submits its vote canvass to the secretary of state because it relates to its “ability to lawfully certify election results.” County officials have until Nov. 28 to respond to the letter’s request.
But in response, Gates said Maricopa won’t delay the vote canvass.
“Prior to the canvass, the County will respond to a letter from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office requesting information about the administration of the November General Election,” he said last week in response to the letter. “Board members received this letter on Saturday night and had a team working on a response all day Sunday, even as staff continued counting votes. We look forward to answering the AG’s questions with transparency as we have done throughout this election.”
Lake’s recent comments come as outgoing Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey met with Hobbs on Wednesday and confirmed he would work with her to carry out a transition of power.
“Today I congratulated Governor-elect Katie Hobbs on her victory in a hard-fought race and offered my full cooperation as she prepares to assume the leadership of the State of Arizona,” Ducey said in a statement on Wednesday.
With 99 percent of the vote counted, Hobbs leads Lake by about 16,000 votes, according to The Associated Press.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. They have contacted Maricopa County for comment.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
