Arizona Judge Allows Two of Kari Lake’s Election Challenge Claims to go to Trial
The judge dismissed eight of the 10 claims.
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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Comments
The Maricopa County election board is so fouled up, that in any close election they basically pick the Winner. And, they act like it’s not really important that the vote tallies be right.
Two out of ten complaints made it through to an evidentiary hearing. Not sure how this will go. To me, it seems like there is always someone able to say “so sorry, no”.
My hope is this will trigger a do-over for all State and Federal candidates without using voting machines, all votes cast on paper in one day, with all of the counting closely watched and videotaped, and with known voter totals from each precinct within a short amount of time after polls close.
The official final tally by midnight local time. But, that is a lot to wish for when corruption isn’t even trying to be hidden.
All votes in Arizona are cast on paper.
Also, your proposal would require people to vote in their own precincts. The whole problem was caused by the fact that AZ lets people vote anywhere in their home county, which means that an individual ballot has to be printed on demand for each voter, instead of pre-printing the ballots for each precinct as happens in most places. Hence the need for the printers to be working 100%, which they weren’t.
“ All votes in Arizona are cast on paper.”
Yes, but prepared, or straight from the roll?
“Hence the need for the printers to be working 100%, which they weren’t.”
A perfect example of the belief that “technology will save us”. The people who designed this system are fools, knaves, or both.
I worked with a printing system comprising many printers for many years. The probability of the number of printers in the Maricopa system to be working 100% for an entire day is zero.
I am not knowledgeable of the Maricopa Arizona voting structure. In my current residence in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, my voting precinct records everyone who appears and wishes to vote. As my precinct is a small section of the town with specified boundaries, a total potential vote is already known. By counting citizens as they present to vote an actual number is then determined from the book. This total number of votes is what I was referring to. Here, there is a known top limit, in Arizona I guess that top limit is unknown, but the cast vote by presenting citizens should be a known and reportable data point soon after polls close.
To me, this eliminates the ability to have 100,000 votes suddenly found at 3 AM.
Not just that, but also be forced by the Secretary of State to accept the results.
The Secretary of State is Katie Hobbs, who just declared herself the winner of the gubernatorial race.
There’s really no way around that. The secretary of state is almost always on the ballot for something. Either she’s running for reelection or she’s running for some higher office. It’s rare for a SoS to just call it quits and not run for anything at all.
One way to move the ball forward to cleaner elections is to focus more on the issues of competence and transparency. Whatever else was going on in Maricopa no one can claim that election day was run competently or transparently. From voter registration list maintenance to counting ballots every step must be done in a competent and fully transparent manner. No more excuses should be accepted without immediate resignation, investigation and monitoring to ensure future compliance.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors are McCain holdovers who have worked their collective asses off to defeat conservative Republicans.
Awfully strange how all of those voting machines that worked just fine throughout the early voting process just suddenly failed all at once on election day, isn’t it?
I think we need to realize we need to win statewide offices to be in any position to improve elections anywhere and to do that we really need to stop nominating candidates who are bad for the states they are running.
Mark Finchman would have had a very difficult time winning Secretary of State in Wyoming let alone an actual swing state. That he managed to get 47% of the vote shows exactly how bad a position Democrats are in in Arizona.
Why did we nominate someone who supported Bundy, and violent takeover of a wildlife preserve who was active in stop the steal……oh wait we nominated him BECAUSE he was a horrible candidate.
His criticism of George Soros started with mentioning George Soros as a Holocaust survivor……..once you strongly imply (or as I interpreted the tweet outright screaming) that the reason you don’t like George Soros isn’t because he is a man with some of the worst ideas in the world who has used his money to put those into practice but because he is a Jew…..thanks for making George Soros beyond criticism jackass secretary of state nominee. The idea Democrats are loyal to Mike Bloomberg confirms he hates George Soros for very different reasons than we do because Mike Bloomberg got practically no votes in the 2020 election cycle and ended up humiliated by his campaign which attracted well……
He was at the stop the steal rally, he was the Arizonan Doug Mastriano, only anti-Semitic and convinced Mike Bloomberg runs the Democrat Party.
The first step to improving election concerns is for us as Republicans to look in the mirror. Trump got us to nominate possibly the worst candidate in Arizona state history because he was 100% loyal to stop the steal (a movement that is unelectable in swing places like Arizona).
We could rant all we want; it won’t make any difference unless we return to winning elections. Mark Finchem I am able to confidently say is the Arizonan Mastriano. We need to stop doing that.
What are you referring to here? A quick web search yielded either nothing or too much.
I couldn’t find original tweets about George Soros, I was surprised but possibly censored by twitter because I couldn’t find them on twitter or in text besides media quoting from them. Either way if you think Democrats are loyal to Mike Bloomberg after the 2020 nomination process….
Unfortunately while looking for his earlier tweets I found things that make him a much worst candidate than I thought he was for example here he is saying Mike Pence orchestrated a coup and is a spy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sxC5z9urQ the spying claim……
Even without finding his earlier tweets I found he was an Oath Keeper.
I also found his support for the nature preserve takeover was worst than I thought (he was a founding member of the coalition of western states).
I wish I had been able to find the original tweets the media quoted from but regrettably I couldn’t. For what it is worth though if there was context that changes the tweets and he didn’t actually mean to tell people George Soros is a Jew and Mike Bloomberg secretly controls the Democrat Party that means he is the most incompetent man ever nominated.
Danny,
Lawsuits forcing the elections officials to meet their burden of performance as laid out in the elections n statutes and in federal law are ultimately more effective.
Step one is clean the voter registration lists. If we don’t/won’t do that we will continue to lose.
The Arizona Secretary of State nominee did nothing besides prove that he legitimately lost in front of a Republican judge.
We need to go over his extremist past, and look in the mirror for the fact that we were dumb enough to nominate him simply because Trump told us to when we should have vetted and rejected him.
Nominating an Oath Keeper with a history of supporting political violence?
Even without further context of stop the steal membership and claiming Mike Pence was a spy, and possible anti-Semitic (now deleted) tweets concerning Mike Bloomberg that was an obviously losing candidacy.
I don’t think voter rolls had anything to do with Arizona elections 2022, if it did we would be counting lost congressional seats in Arizona it had to do with us fielding candidates we shouldn’t have even considered letting on the ticket. The only down the wire race we had in Arizona was Kari Lake and if she had not told McCain voters to vote the other side (there is no other interpretation of “get out”) she would probably have won.
We need to stop pretending we can’t lost it is a losing strategy.
Interesting how those machines worked perfectly in testing and in the primaries, but suddenly developed widespread failures in Republican districts when the Dem Sec. of State was running for Gov against a Republican challenger. Odd how that happens. And fifteen thousand votes just turning up out of the chaos seems a bit odd too.
I guess having sacks of ballots turn up in car trunks is so last century. But I suppose we are entering the Century of the Fruitbat, so…
A reporter followed a Penske truck after it was loaded with ballots from a polling station, supposed to go direct to be counted by the county. Instead, the truck stopped at the printing company that prints ballots for the State, takes on more load, then goes to get the ballots counted. Posted pics and video.
Yes it’s suspicious as hell, and likely in violation of voting law, but unless the reporter has video of the contents of the additional load there’s no chance the judge allows that to be entered into evidence.
That’s how this entire election challenge will go: yes it violates state law but you have no hard evidence of fraud. You don’t be granted discovery to find it unless you already have hard evidence.
There was a extra step involved in their whole mail in voting process. The envelopes for those ballots had to be scanned, as part of the procedure to verify signatures.. This is where Lake is challenging the chain of custody. The company hired to scan the envelopes was Runbeck.
From what I have read the machines did not work because the printed ballots were too light and the tabulators could not read them. The company that printed the ballots is also the same company that tabulated and verified the signatures. It is also a big Democrat donor. No other county had this issue so it is almost a given it was done deliberately. Of course, this will never be proven and the court will reject this argument. A recount will prove nothing unless the addresses and signatures are verified on each ballot. Just as the GOP has let us down over and over, don’t expect much from this trial. Court rulings are based on hard laws and facts but the same court disallows many hard facts to be presented.
This gets to the more general problem of courts rarely granting discovery in election fraud cases.
A couple of weeks ago a troll was on here saying how this was a done deal and it would be certified and we need to stop complaining. Well, I haven’t seen that clown today.
We need to move back to voting on one day, in person, with ID, on trackable ballots, except for in-person absentee balloting, with mail-in reserved for people overseas (acquired through the embassy for civilians or your base voting office for military).
Thank you for the posting. I’ll be waiting patiently for the outcome.
On one hand we have fair and reasonably honest elections that measure the “consent of the governed”. On the other we have the retention of power by those who hold it BAMN. Look at the country now, and place your bets.
Subotai Bahadur
intent should not be the standard, whether through intent, or negligent, the results were the same, ballots not counted
Votes were not counted, because people gave up..Votes from real people, that did show up in person… The problem is that election systems count ballots not votes. It doesn’t matter how many schemes are introduced to make them match, that only causes more chaos.