Kari Lake’s trial is over. The big reveal about the Arizona election is, well… revealed.
Turns out there was no overwhelming evidence that some nefarious soul in Maricopa County was plotting to rob Lake of victory.
There wasn’t even a small fireworks display. Not even a party popper.
There was only Lake’s attorney, who held on to a theory that someone had shrunk the ballots to cause Election Day chaos and cost Lake the election.
“This is about trust,” said Lake’s attorney Kurt Olsen in his closing argument. “It’s about rebuilding people’s trust.”
Team Lake couldn’t prove either count
According to Maricopa County Supreme Court Judge Peter Thompson’s order, it was actually evidence that someone deliberately caused the district’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction — and that enough “identifiable” votes were lost as a result. to change the outcome of the election.
And the issue was whether the Republican-run county was deliberately playing fast and loose with the rules requiring them to keep early ballots, allowing Democrat Katie Hobbs to get away with the win.
Key Facts:Behind the Claims in Kari Lake’s Election Challenge
Team Lake didn’t come close on either count.
Instead, her lawyers offered:
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A whistleblower from Runbeck Elections Services, the county’s election contractor, who did not testify but instead admitted to a Lake investigator that she saw colleagues bring in 50 early ballots from relatives and illegally add them to the vote count. Lake lost to Governor-elect Katie Hobbs by 17,117 votes.
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A partisan pollster calling himself the “People’s Pundit” — a man whose polling firm, Big Data Poll, scored an F-score on the poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight — who took an exit poll of 813 voters in Maricopa County and concluded somehow that 15,603 to 29,257 Lake supporters did not vote due to Election Day issues. “I believe it was substantial enough to change the standings,” Rich Baris testified.
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Affidavits from 200 voters who said they were affected by Election Day issues. But only three of them did not vote according to the province and that was their choice. Refusing to wait in line or putting your ballot in a secure box to be counted later is not evidence of disenfranchised voters.
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And finally, a cybersecurity expert who testified that the district’s printers were set to spit out 19-inch ballots on 20-inch paper—ballots that couldn’t be counted at the time. Except he admitted they would have been numbered. When a ballot cannot be read by a polling station tabulator, he acknowledged that it has been sent to a bipartisan council of workers who transfer the voter’s choices to a new ballot so that it can be tabulated.
Printer problem was a snafu, not a plan
Scott Jarrett, the county’s co-elections director, testified Thursday that temporary technicians sent out on election day to troubleshoot problems at three polling stations accidentally made the printers so small they couldn’t fit, causing the polling station tabulators disapproved of them.
What he described was a snafu, not a plan.
But Lake’s expert, Clay Parikh, said those 19-inch ballots showed up in ballots he inspected earlier this week from all six polling stations, so it “couldn’t have been accidental.”
Ipso facto, a conspiracy-o.
Who knows? Maybe it would have worked in fantasyland. But here in Maricopa County, there are those bipartisan councils that make such votes count. So even if there was a plot (questionable), it was foiled when those votes were finally counted.
Just don’t tell Lake that. Her campaign’s Twitter account has been on fire for the past two days, putting her own rather remarkable spin on trial testimony (along with regular pleas for donations). Like this fictionalized blockbuster:
Elections Director Scott Jarrett confirms that the printer setup change that led to the mass disenfranchisement of voters in Arizona DID take place on the morning of Election Day. Kari Lake War Room tweeted.
Judge should punish Kari Lake for this
As for the always hurt Lake, always playing the court of public opinion, she predictably claimed victory leaving the courthouse on Thursday afternoon.
“We proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was malicious intent that caused such major disruptions that it changed the results of the election,” she told reporters.
Something was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, okay. And it should be followed by sanctions, as a warning to candidates that they better come to court armed with something more than sour grapes if they want to quash the results of an election.
If Lake had evidence of a county conspiracy to deny her what was her due, it certainly wasn’t offered in court this week.
Conspiracy theories on her Twitter account, sure. But actual evidence in a courtroom? No.
Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @LaurieRoberts.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The Kari Lake election bomb goes bust
