Kari Lake shows damning evidence

The Twitter Files seem to have taken a break yesterday – but another, equally significant case came to trial. In Lake v. Hobbs, Richer, et al., candidate Kari Lake contests the certification of the Governor’s race in Arizona. Lake “lost” that race by 17,177 votes. Yesterday, trial began in the case – and Kari Lake and her legal team developed evidence strongly suggesting intentional ballot tampering throughout Maricopa County. Unless the defense can explain these findings, the judge might have to call a new election, at least.

How Kari Lake won a trial

CNAV covered the Kari Lake election contest last week (along with the case of Brunson v. Adams, now set for a SCOTUS conference). Before then, we reported on the election itself – which was an inexcusable disaster. 59 percent of scanner-tabulators could not tabulate ballots that Officers of Election fed to them. Precinct chiefs then told voters to vote at other locations – and when they got there, those precinct chiefs told them they’d already voted.

The Kari Lake campaign sued the Maricopa County Elections Board and asked a judge to extend voting hours. The judge declined. Still, Katie Hobbs won by a comparatively slim margin. Nevertheless she certified her own election – whereupon Lake filed an immediate election contest. The clerk of the court has the complaint at this link.

The 70-page complaint lists ten allegations against Maricopa County, where half the people of Arizona live. On Monday, Judge Peter Thompson dismissed eight of the ten counts. He said that, even if true, they did not meet the legal criteria for an election contest. But two counts remained, and on the basis of those two, the judge moved the case to trial:

• Scanner-tabulators not working at 60 percent of precincts, and
• Nearly 300,000 ballots arriving at a central counting center without a chain of custody.

Misprinted, therefore misaligning, ballots

The first day of the trial took more than four and a half hours.

Judge Thompson set a high bar – possibly because Lake actually “prayed” that the court declare her the winner. She would have to prove, not merely the possibility, but a fact that these two flaws affected the election outcome. Not only that, but she must prove that these flaws happened, not by accident, but by intent.

In yesterday’s session, testimony revealed why those scanner-tabulators did not work: wrong-sized ballots. This came out in expert testimony by a witness who examined three samples of fifty paper ballots each. About 42 percent of the ballots in his samples were 19-inch ballots printed on 20-inch paper.

This tweet shows the problem:

To put those two images in perspective: they each have rows of rectangles on them. A ballot scanner, like a standardized test answer sheet scanner, uses those rectangles to align an image for interpretation. If those rectangles are out of position, the scanner rejects the ballot. So when someone inserts a 20-inch sheet, the scanner expects the rectangles to align in a certain way. And they were out of alignment – because someone shipped ballots printed on the wrong size of paper.

That does not happen by accident. It happens by intent.

Roger O’Handley (who just got his Twitter privileges restored) added his own perspective.

The official campaign Twitter account has more:

And another witness spoke directly to that high bar:

Manipulation of inactive voter records

Elections Director Scott Jarrett (another defendant) testified that turnout was an “historically high” 64 percent. Or was it? Apparently the Recorder’s Office shifted about 225,000 voters to the “inactive” category. Why would they do that?

This embedded video reveals that chain of custody simply did not exist. Workers transported bins of ballots from voting precincts, with no attempt to count them.

Apparently the Maricopa County attorney made a serious slip: he talked about signature verification. The judge had previously dismissed a count relating to this issue. But by mentioning it at trial, the attorney opened the door.

County Recorder Stephen Richer made another apparent mistake. He denied having formed a Political Action Committee to oppose Kari Lake. But if the allegation in this tweet is true, someone simply dredged up his tweets announcing the PAC from the Wayback Machine, or something of the kind.

How it is done in a typical precinct

Trial resumes today – but clearly the defense is at a serious disadvantage.

Your editor is not a lawyer, but he is an experienced Officer of Election. County Clerks of Elections do not send out scanner-tabulators to precincts without testing them first. And they certainly do not send out ballots printed on the wrong size of paper! The test must be with the same kind of ballot that voters will actually use on Election Day.

At the end of any polling day, the precinct chief, or an officer he designates, physically counts ballots when retrieving them from the ballot bin beneath the scanner. This bin is locked during the day, and only the chief has the key. Furthermore, the chief “runs the tape” on the scanner, in order to report results to the County Clerk. The total vote must match the number of physical ballots in the bin. After that, the officers place the ballots into a corrugated box, label it, and seal it.

Then every officer must sign his or her name to every report that will go back to County Election Headquarters. This includes “the tape” from the scanner and another printout from the Electronic Poll Book. The total vote must match the number of persons issued ballots. The chief then drives the box, and all reports, back to Headquarters. All of which to say: chain of custody is part of everything that precinct-level Officers of Election do.

Kari Lake won the day

In sum, the goings-on in Maricopa County are inexcusable and inexplicable. More to the point, the numbers of ballots involved are in the hundreds of thousands in Maricopa County alone. Kari Lake carried nearly every other county – and again, Katie Hobbs “won” by 17,177 votes.

Thus Kari Lake would appear to have met her burden of proof – to show outcome-affecting irregularities that happened by intent. Whether she has or hasn’t, is for Judge Thompson to determine.