Kari Lake's Election Challenge May Have Just Got a Major Boost from Biden DOJ's Conviction
The Biden Justice Department may have just inadvertently strengthened Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s case that November’s election in Maricopa County should be set aside.
At the end of last month, the DOJ secured the conviction of Douglass Mackey, known on Twitter as “Ricky Vaughn,” on the charge of “conspiracy against rights.”
The charge stemmed from communications the conservative Mackey made via text and through social media posts encouraging people to vote by text for 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
It is not possible to vote by text, but according to the DOJ at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers did text “Hillary” or some derivation of it to the number 59925 that Mackey had promoted.
Whether people who responded to the text or social media posts thought they were actually voting or simply expressing their support for Clinton in some type of poll or requesting information on how to vote absentee is not known.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that federal investigators could not find anyone who thought they actually voted by text when they tracked down some of the people who texted to the number in Mackey’s memes. “So, there’s no victim here,” Carlson pointed out.
The main witness against Mackey was a man who was in Mackey’s chat group. But the government prevented Mackey’s lawyer from cross-examining, talking to, or even learning the name of this man, because the “witness” was an FBI plant in Mackey’s group.
Tucker Carlson discusses the case of Douglass Mackey, known on Twitter as “Ricky Vaughn”, who the Biden DOJ is trying to send to jail for *10 Years* for posting Memes about Hillary Clinton in 2016. pic.twitter.com/1CO0q4cdso
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) March 15, 2023
“That violates the confrontation clause in the Constitution. You get to confront witnesses against you in a free country, especially when they’re FBI informants,” Carlson argued.
Now, if it was wrong for Mackey to post silly memes that may have created some confusion about voting via text, how much worse was what happened in Maricopa County in November’s election, when there were likely many thousands of voters prevented from voting due to ballot printer and tabulator issues?
Mackey’s actions in no way impacted the result of the 2016 presidential election between Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, but someone’s or perhaps a group of people’s actions in Maricopa County likely did impact the outcome of the governor’s race between Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs, as well as the attorney general’s race between Republican Abe Hamadeh and Kris Mayes.
Hobbs won by about 17,000 votes and Mayes by 511.
Hours-long lines formed in Maricopa County at polling stations after ballot printers and tabulators malfunctioned.
Lake has argued that since Republicans voted 3-to-1 over Democrats on Election Day, what happened was large-scale vote suppression of her supporters.
Lake’s attorneys reviewed ballots in December and found over 40 percent of them had a 19-inch image printed on a 20-inch ballot causing the bar codes on them not to align correctly so tabulators could read them.
At her trial in December, Lake attorney Kurt Olsen asked cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh, “Is there any way, in your opinion, for a 19-inch ballot image to be projected on a 20-inch ballot by accident?”
“No sir,” Parikh responded.
“Why not?” Olsen followed up.
“Because the settings and the configurations and the procedures that are used cannot allow that,” Parikh said.
“is there anyway this could have happened by accident”…pertaining to the 19 inch ballot being casted as a 20 inch ballot.
“No sir, the system would not allow that”
The system takes away human error.
So it was intentional? pic.twitter.com/z2Xlmb82P1
— Slayed Wolf (@TheBerthaR) December 21, 2022
Ballot printer expert Bob Hughes in an affidavit filed by 2022 GOP Secretary of State Mark Finchem candidate last month concluded what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day could not have been accidental.
“Ballot styles are built ahead of each election and are stored as PDF’s for each ballot style. PDFs are locked style formats that cannot be revised on the fly,” wrote Hughes, who noted he has 16 years experience printing ballots for Maricopa County.
“It was suggested a 19-inch format was incorrectly used by mistake; However, during the review of the [Logic and Accuracy] reports at MCTEC [Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center], I was told only 20-inch formats were created and no 19-inch format ballots were created for the 2022 election,” Hughes continued.
This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County. How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of ED voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke pic.twitter.com/noY1RRQv0Q
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 14, 2022
“This clearly indicates that the interference caused by 19″ ballots had to have been by someone from MCTEC or by someone hacking into the MCTEC system,” he wrote.
Hughes concluded: “The assertion that random accidents occurred on Election Day is impossible. A large number of printers, all printing ballots of the wrong 19-inch size on Election Day, is not a random accident.”
On the morning of Election Day in November, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, with Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer by his side, said “about 20 percent” of 223 polling locations were experiencing ballot tabulator problems. The county later reported nearly one-third of the polling sites, 70 in all, had the issue.
At Lake’s election challenge trial in December, Republican National Committee lawyer Mark Sonnenklar testified that his team of roving attorneys on Election Day found the ballot printer problems occurred at 132 locations, or 59 percent in all.
An analysis by Rachel Alexander with The Arizona Sun Times in November found that of the 70 locations the county identified, 59 were in heavily Republican areas, two were in Republican-leaning areas, and only nine were in Democratic-learning or solidly Democratic parts of the county.
🚨Breaking🚨
Maricopa County Tabulation & Election Center had a “heat map” in their central count showing “Republican Voter Dot Density.
Our team compared it with the locations where tabulator failures occurred on Election Day
This was a targeted attack on Republican voters pic.twitter.com/mB0JE8a7e4
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) January 30, 2023
If election interference in the “sacred right to vote” is wrong on the minor scale that Biden’s DOJ had Mackey convicted on, how much more for what happened in Maricopa County?
Lake’s and Hamadeh’s cases are currently in the Arizona court system. Lake’s attorney has suggested she may take her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
What happened in Maricopa County likely changed the outcome in both races and should not be allowed to stand.
November’s election in the county must be set aside and a new one ordered.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
