Arizona Republican Kari Lake appealed her 2022 governor’s race election challenge to the Arizona Supreme Court Thursday, even as she runs for a U.S. Senate seat.
Lake posted on X on Wednesday, “I will be filing a Petition for Review with the Arizona Supreme Court tomorrow (7/11) because I care about our sacred vote and Election Integrity.”
🚨BREAKING🚨
I will be filing a Petition for Review with the Arizona Supreme Court tomorrow (7/11) because I care about our sacred vote and Election Integrity.— Kari Lake (@KariLake) July 11, 2024
Her announcement came after the Arizona Court of Appeals dismissed her request for a new trial based on information not previously available when the case first went to court in 2022.
In Lake’s petition to the Arizona Supreme Court, her attorneys argued that Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs’ narrow win (0.6 percent or approximately 17,000 votes) should be overturned based on the failure of Maricopa County to conduct the logic and accuracy tests on its vote tabulating machines as required by law.
Further, the county did not perform the mail-in ballot signature verification the law demands.
“On Election Day, Maricopa vote centers experienced ballot-reading errors — rejecting an average of over 7,000 ballots every 30 minutes from shortly after polls opened until polls closed — causing massive lines and wait times, interfering with the voting rights of tens of thousands of predominately Republican voters,” the brief said.
Here is the problem w/ what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. This is Anthem, north of Phoenix at about 1:15 pm. Ruby red district of about 30K people. Only one polling location. Ballot tabulators not working in the morning. 2 hr wait to vote midday and still at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/CY35yQWwq5
— Randy DeSoto (@RandyDeSoto) November 14, 2022
“Maricopa revealed seven months after the fact, that — without any public announcement, after the tabulators were purportedly certified on October 11, 2022 — Maricopa broke the ‘tamper evident seals’ on all 446 vote-center tabulators and removed, reformatted, and replaced the memory cards between October 14-18, 2022, for all vote-center tabulators used on Election Day,” Lake’s attorney wrote.
“The SLOG files show Maricopa began unannounced ‘testing’ three days after Maricopa and the Secretary certified the tabulators following purported statutorily compliant L&A testing on October 11, finding that 260 of the 446 tabulators [nearly two-thirds] experienced the same ‘Ballot Misread’ and ‘Paper-Jam’ error codes that arose on Election Day,” the court filing says.
“In short, Maricopa had advance notice that tabulators would reject ballots on Election Day and did nothing to fix it.”
Lake’s attorneys concluded, “If Maricopa had properly conducted L&A testing as it falsely testified it had, the testing would have identified — and thus prevented — the 2022 Election Day chaos.”
“Alternatively, if Maricopa had not falsely testified that it conducted L&A testing, Lake could have presented this issue during the December 2022 bench trial — before the gubernatorial term began — and in her first appeal.”
As for signature verification, Lake’s petition stated, “Maricopa’s keystroke logs showed that its signature reviewers compared 275,000+ early ballot signatures with record signatures in under three seconds per signature, and 70,000 signatures in under two seconds per comparison.”
Lake’s expert testified at trial “that it is impossible to ‘compare’ ballot-envelope signatures with record signatures, as required by A.R.S. § 16-550(A) and Maricopa’s stated signature procedures at those speeds,” according to her Supreme Court filing.
Last month, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s view that it was only “sheer speculation” that issues on election day discouraged “a substantial number of predominantly Lake voters” from casting ballots.
Further, regarding signature verification, the court ruled, “Lake did not show that the applicable signature verification procedures were not performed, let alone that non-performance affected an outcome-determinative number of votes.”
Last year, Maricopa County denied that it failed to follow the logic and accuracy tests required by law.
The county posted on social media that the test was live-streamed.
Additionally, the county explained there was no issue with new memory cards being installed in the machines after the L&A testing was completed.
Claim: “Maricopa County did secret testing of tabulation equipment. Just look at this video!”
Facts: If it was a secret, why did we livestream it? That’s the opposite of secret. People interested in the facts can find those in our May 10 court filing. Excerpt below: pic.twitter.com/Kwo35exdEk
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) May 30, 2023
“A judge already considered this supposedly ‘new’ evidence in Ms. Lake’s election contest and found it unconvincing,” Maricopa said.
