OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A lawyer for 2022 Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake presented oral arguments before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson on Friday after the case was remanded to the lower court by the state Supreme Court last month.
Thompson is currently deliberating on the Motions to Dismiss submitted by the defendants, as well as a lengthy 263-page Motion for Relief from Judgment filed by Lake’s attorneys, the Arizona Sun-Times reported.
The motion seeks the reinstatement of Lake’s second count pertaining to “illegal BOD printer/tabulator configurations,” which Thompson had previously dismissed in December. The state’s highest court, however, ordered him to reconsider the issue of signature verification issues.
Lake attorney Kurt Olsen told Thompson that new evidence being introduced shows there was “clear misconduct and intent.”
He added: “This evidence supports our allegation that the election was rigged.”
The Sun-Times noted further that Olsen argued the new evidence, namely the system log files and tabulator records, had been provided to Lake’s legal team only in the past few months after the trial had already concluded.
The outlet added:
Olsen said there were four new issues since the trial took place in December. First, he said the new evidence refutes the testimony of Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett regarding problems with ballots printing. The tabulators failed to recognize many of the ballots on Election Day because they were 19-inch ballots printed on 20-inch paper.
Jarrett testified at trial on the first day that this problem did not happen. On the second day of trial, he testified that it had occurred, and said the county was performing a root-cause analysis, which was ongoing. Jarrett claimed that it was determined that some techs not authorized by the county made some changes to the printer configurations on-site.
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— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) May 8, 2023
But Olsen argued: “The new evidence shows this was absolutely false.”
During the hearing, Olsen referred to a declaration from cyber expert Clay Parikh, which was included as an exhibit in Lake’s motion contradicting the claims made by the defendants.
Olsen also mentioned a report commissioned by the county from former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Ruth McGregor, which investigated the printing issue.
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— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) May 9, 2023
According to the Lake attorney, McGregor’s report indicated that during printer tests, some printers began misprinting, and neither technical experts nor the report itself could provide a satisfactory explanation for this occurrence. Olsen suggested that the misprinting could have been caused by malware or remote access to the printers because it occurred with two different printer brands.
“Another false statement Olsen said Jarrett made was that the printing problem only happened in three vote centers since random checks showed it occurred at a minimum of four. Robert Gouveia, an Arizona attorney who has covered Lake’s election contest extensively, said during a live video analysis discussing the hearing, ‘Jarrett lied on the stand,'” the Sun-Times reported.
Olsen also argued that “new and compelling evidence” indicates that “Maricopa falsely certified it passed Logic and Accuracy testing, and afterward, secretly tested all 446 vote center tabulators on October 14th, 17th, and 18th, and knew that 260 of the vote center tabulators would fail on Election Day.”
Olsen pointed out that the county has recently admitted that they had not initially configured the tabulators to accept early ballots and provisional ballots. Subsequently, they went ahead and reconfigured the tabulators without conducting the necessary testing, as mandated by statute A.R.S. 16-449.
Olsen emphasized that the county waited seven months before disclosing this information regarding the reinstallation of the software without proper testing, which, he argued, rendered all the tabulators null and void.
Meanwhile, the Sun-Times noted that Joseph La Rue, the attorney for Maricopa County, admitted problems with Maricopa County’s process of verifying signatures.
“It’s not really a hard and fast science,” he told the court. “If we would bring signatures in here, Your Honor, you might think some are consistent, and I might think they were inconsistent or vice versa.”