OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s legal battle to get to the bottom of what she believes is a host of election problems stemming from the 2022 race she narrowly lost is far from over.
The former newscaster, who is a strong ally of former President Donald Trump, filed a 74-page lawsuit against Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and election officials in Maricopa County after claiming she has uncovered new evidence to substantiate her allegations.
In previous legal filings, Lake was unable to convince courts that the results of the election were tainted by a combination of misconduct and malfunctioning election systems as well as improper signature verification of ballots by early voters.
Now, Lake has filed an appeal of a ruling that went against her in May, according to the Arizona Republic. The appeal, which deals with election-related problems in Maricopa, was transferred to a state appeals court in Tucson.
In her opening brief, Lake argues that new evidence allegedly proves her arguments about tainted election results.
“New evidence demonstrates that Maricopa falsely certified its 446 vote-center tabulators passed mandatory L&A certification testing prior to Election Day and strongly suggests Maricopa planned the Election Day debacle,” says the court brief; L&A stands for “logic and accuracy.”
That is important, the filing states, because “misconfigured and defective BOD-printed ballots caused Maricopa’s vote-center tabulators to reject tens of thousands of ballots, which would have been prevented by proper L&A testing.”
BOD stands for “ballot on demand,” the Western Journal notes.
“The ensuing chaos led to massive lines and wait times, thereby impairing or depriving the right to vote of tens of thousands of predominately Republican voters” as a result, said the filing.
“Arizona elections are now in uncharted territory,” the filing continued.
“New evidence produced by Maricopa County (‘Maricopa’) strongly suggests that Maricopa officials intentionally sabotaged the 2022 General Election, then gave false testimony attempting to cover up their misconduct. Even viewed in the light most favorable to Maricopa, the evidence shows Maricopa intentionally failed to conduct logic and accuracy (‘L&A’) testing” required by law and “altered the election equipment thereby rendering the election irredeemably flawed.”
The filing also said that the October testing ahead of the November election was “simply kabuki theatre.”
“After Maricopa conducted its falsely ‘certified’ L&A testing on October 11, 2022, Maricopa conducted unannounced and unlawful testing on all 446 vote-center tabulators on October 14, 17, and 18. The tabulator system log files show that 260 of the vote-center tabulators rejected ballots with the same tabulator error codes that occurred on Election Day. In other words, this evidence supports a conclusion that Maricopa’s unannounced and unlawful testing was a dry run for the Election Day debacle,” the filing added.
Continuing, the filing said that “Maricopa officials admitted, seven months after the fact, that between October 14-18, 2022, they swapped out the memory cards and the election software installed on Maricopa’s 446 vote-center tabulators with “reformatted memory cards” that purportedly contained election software supposedly previously tested on other equipment. Maricopa did not perform L&A testing on these 446 tabulators after swapping out the elections software and memory cards as required.”
Supporters of the 2022 gubernatorial candidate are also citing a recent court ruling to lend more credence to her filing.
Earlier this month, Yavapai County Superior Court Judge John Napper expressed his belief that the existing process of verifying voter signatures on early ballots does not adhere to state law.
By declining to dismiss a case against the state, he stated his belief that the law mandated a signature match with the registration records of Arizona voters. That opinion contradicts the current prevailing practice of utilizing alternative documents for signature verification.
According to Tucson.com, Lake supporter Ryan Heath is citing that in a new court filing arguing the election Lake lost should be re-done.
“Maricopa County failed, in fact, to apply uniform signature verification standards for a material number of approximately 1.3 million votes cast through mail-in ballots,” Heath said in his filing. “As a result, every single one of those 1.3 million votes is tainted by the fatal stain of ‘uncertainty,’ requiring the setting aside of all ballots from Maricopa County for all statewide races for the 2022 General Election as a matter of law.”
