Kari Lake Lawsuit Accuses Maricopa County Of 'Unlawful' Certification of Voting Machines
Republican Kari Lake’s legal team filed a brief at the Arizona Court of Appeals Tuesday arguing Maricopa County broke the law by falsely stating voting machines were certified prior to the November 2022 general election when she was a candidate for governor.
In May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled against Lake concluding she had not provided sufficient evidence that Arizona election law was not followed during the contest, which Democrat Katie Hobbs won by less than one percent of the vote.
Lake then appealed the ruling in June.
In July, the Arizona Court of Appeals based in Phoenix transferred the case over to the division based in Tucson, which is a part of Pima County.
Well, the Arizona appellate court just transferred our election case to another appellate court division which doesn’t even cover Maricopa County. That appellate court covers Pima County which means the most Marxist part of the state will be hearing our case.
We see what’s…
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) July 9, 2023
In their Tuesday brief to the appeals court, Lake’s attorneys argued new information has come to light since Thompson’s ruling regarding Maricopa County’s failure to certify the voting machines used on Election Day.
Due to ballot printers being misconfigured, hours-long lines formed at multiple voting locations throughout Maricopa County on Election Day as tabulators rejected ballots, the brief states.
“Maricopa’s system log (“SLOG”) files show that Maricopa’s vote-center tabulators rejected defective BOD-printed ballots more than 200,000 times at a rate of over 7,000 every 30 minutes from 6:30 am, shortly after the polls opened, through 8:00 pm, after the polls closed, causing massive lines and chaos on Election Day,” Lake’s lawyers argued.
Further, “in explaining why it removed and installed reformatted memory cards in the 446 vote-center tabulators, Maricopa unwittingly reveals it did not conduct statutorily mandated [Logic and Accuracy or L&A] testing on October 11, 2022 on any of its Election Day vote-center tabulators, much less ‘all’ of them as Arizona law requires,” the attorneys added.
The brief says that evidence shows the county “failed to conduct statutory L&A testing on ‘all of [Maricopa’s] deployable voting equipment’ either on October 11, 2022, or after it broke the seals on the 446 vote-center tabulators and removed, reformatted, and reinstalled the memory cards on October 14, 17, 18.”
Lake’s cyber expert Clay Parikh concluded after reviewing the system log files “that 260 of the 446 tabulators showed error codes from this unannounced testing that were not corrected and were the same errors codes as arose on Election Day.”
The lawyers concluded based on the failure to follow the law, the election must be negated.
“These shortcomings—failing to L&A test all vote-center tabulators on October 11 and altering all vote-center tabulators on October 14, 17, and 18— are material because failing to undergo statutorily mandated L&A testing makes those tabulators unreliable to use in elections, requiring the election to be set aside,” the brief says.
In May, Maricopa County responded on social media to Lake’s allegations regarding logic and accuracy testing not being properly completed, saying the it was live-streamed.
Additionally, the county explained there was no issue in new memory cards being installed in the machines after the L&A testing is 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.
Lake announced Thursday that her attorneys have also filed a petition to transfer her election challenge case to the Arizona Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals.
The petition was filed with the Supreme Court Tuesday.
My legal team has filed for our appeal to be reviewed by the Arizona Supreme Court.
This isn’t about me. This is about restoring the faith of the people of Arizona in their elections moving forward.
2024 is just around the corner.@MaricopaVote must answer for their blatant… https://t.co/sDzfg8LTkr
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 16, 2023
“My legal team has filed for our appeal to be reviewed by the Arizona Supreme Court,” she wrote on X. “This isn’t about me. This is about restoring the faith of the people of Arizona in their elections moving forward. 2024 is just around the corner.”
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