It's Not Over Yet: Kari Lake Files 74-Page Lawsuit Against Katie Hobbs, Election Officials
After 10 months of court battles over the 2022 election, Arizona Republican Kari Lake still has some fight left.
Lake has claimed that the election for governor, which she narrowly lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs, was tainted by misconduct that included malfunctioning election systems and improper signature verification of early voters’ ballots. She launched multiple efforts in Arizona’s state court system to have the results overturned but has not been successful.
She filed her latest appeal of a court ruling that went against her in May, according to the Arizona Republic. That appeal, which dealt with election issues in Maricopa County, was transferred to an appeals court based in Tucson.
Lake’s opening brief in the case says there is new evidence to support her allegations.
“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,” the brief filed with the court said. L&A stands for “logic and accuracy.”
That matters, the filing said, 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.”
As a result, the filing said, “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.”
“Arizona elections are now in uncharted territory,” the filing said.
“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 called the October testing “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 said.
The filing added 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,” the filing said.
Lake supporters are also using a recent court ruling as a vehicle to support her claims.
Earlier this month, Yavapai County Superior Court Judge John Napper indicated that he believed the current practice of verifying voter signatures on early ballots does not follow state law.
In refusing to dismiss a case against the state, he wrote that he believed the law required matching signatures to the registration records of Arizona voters. That’s contrary to the current practice of using other documents to match signatures.
According to Tucson.com., Lake supporter Ryan Heath is using that to call in a new filing that says 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.”
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