Maricopa County Superior Court Judge ruled that two out of the 10 claims of Kari Lake’s challenging the gubernatorial results can go to trial:
The two counts that Judge Thompson ruled can go to trial involve printers malfunctioning on Election Day and ballot chain of custody. Lake claimed printers that malfunctioned were not certified and had “vulnerabilities” that made them “susceptible to hacking.” She also claimed the printers malfunctioned because of “intentional action.”Judge Thompson said Lake must prove at trial that someone interfered with the printers in violation of Arizona law, that the interference caused her to lose votes and that those lost votes affected the outcome of the election.As for the chain of custody issue, Lake claimed employees of the county’s ballot contractor violated the “County Election Manual” when they added ballots of family members and also failed to secure an “Inbound Receipt of Delivery.” Judge Thompson said whether the county complied with its own manual and applicable statutes is a dispute of fact rather than one of law.
Problems at the Arizona polls started as soon as they opened. Maricopa County bought new voting machines after a disastrous 2020 election.
The county bragged for the past year about the new machines, showing officials testing them out on TV.
But for some reason, they bugged out on Election Day.
Arizona’s Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit sent a letter to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, demanding officials explain why the county experienced numerous problems on Election Day.
The problems in the letter align with the judge’s decision.
“These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright.
Wright mentioned the problems with the ballet-on-demand (BOD) printers in “at least 60 voting locations.” The printers did not have uniform configuration settings. The state and federal laws require uniform ballots but that doesn’t always happen so they require uniformity of ballots “within a county.”
The on-site ballot tabulators could not read the ballots.
Here is the kicker: “Based on sworn complaints submitted by election workers employed by Maricopa County, the BOD printers were tested on Monday, November 7 without any apparent problems. Many of those election workers report that despite the successful testing the night before, the tabulators began experiencing problems reading ballots printed by the BOD printers within the first thirty minutes of voting on Tuesday, November 8, 2022.”
Arizona called the race for Democrat Katie Hobbs on November 14. But she won a tight race, 50.41% to 49.59%.
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