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No, Kari Lake didn’t win the 2022 election for governor in Arizona. And no, the recent judicial ruling against her election claims does not mean “our elections can run lawlessly,” as she claimed. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Republican candidate made her case in court, and she lost based on the facts and the law.

For all her inaccuracies and irresponsible claims, Lake got one thing right: Her Democratic opponent, now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, should have recused herself during the election. At the time of the November election, Hobbs was secretary of state, the state’s top election official, and she rebuffed bipartisan calls for her to recuse herself from that role. That meant she was essentially overseeing her own election, in appearance if not in practice.

This creates a strong and obvious perception of a conflict of interest. The same was also true when Republican secretaries of state, like now-Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia or 2012 U.S. Senate candidate Charlie Summers in Maine, also didn’t clearly or fully recuse themselves while running for a different office. (Summers said at the time that he took steps to eliminate conflicts of interest.) And it will remain true until states pass laws to require and plan for this kind of recusal.

Lake has spent months lobbing accusations and...

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