Kari Lake, a former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, has filed a new appeal with the state’s highest court in relation to her election-related litigation that question the accuracy of thousands of ballots.
According to Just the News, Lake’s attorneys claim that at least 8,000 ballots were not legible and were not “duplicated or counted” on the second page of her appeal.
“The ballot-on-demand printer investigation report by former Chief Justice McGregor (‘the McGregor Report’) found that ‘four printers randomly printed one or a few ‘fit to page’ ballots in the middle of printing a batch of ballots…[n]one of the technical people with whom we spoke could explain how or why that error occurred.’ Appx:0281,” the appeal says.
“Lake’s expert testified this ‘error’ could only result from malware or remote access and resulted in at least 8,000 misconfigured ballots, the vast majority of which were neither duplicated nor counted,” it continues.
The former Phoenix-area television anchor claimed last week that her case had been transferred to a different appellate court division.
“Well, the Arizona appellate court just transferred our election case to another appellate court division which doesn’t even cover Maricopa County,” she noted on Twitter. “That appellate court covers Pima County which means the most Marxist part of the state will be hearing our case.”
She added the following in a post that featured a video of her giving an interview: “59% of polling locations in Maricopa County had machines fail. And the Fake News won’t cover it. I won’t stop fighting until we make sure that all Arizonans’ voice & vote counts. That’s why we’ve filed an appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court on our case.”
According to AZPM, the choice to move her case to Tucson was made based on a state statute that “lets the Phoenix Appeals Court randomly send cases to Tucson to ease its workload.”
If necessary, Lake has previously threatened to push her case all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Additionally, she is thinking about challenging Sen. Kirsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) in the upcoming election, according to NBC News.
However, she has also made it plain that she is still committed to obtaining relief for her election dispute.
“This is, I believe, our best hope to get reform in our elections: my case,” Lake told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show last week. “I believe it’s the greatest election case. We have the truth on our side. We have tons of evidence. Yes, we haven’t had a judge rule in our favor. But it takes a lot of courage to make the right ruling on this case.”
After losing to the current Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, Lake has been fighting the results of the 2022 election in court. She asserts that countless Republican voters in Maricopa County were prevented from exercising their right to vote on Election Day because of voting system malfunctions at more over 60% of the voting locations.
She also expressed worry about serious problems with the mail-in ballot signature verification procedure.
As part of her ongoing battle against what she perceives as fraudulent acts that she claims contributed to her loss, a judge in Maricopa County decided last week that he would not prevent Lake’s attempts to examine vote affidavit envelopes from last year’s election.
Maricopa County attorneys had maintained that the signatures on the ballot affidavit are considered confidential because they are a vital component of the voter registration record, which is protected by state law, with the exception of a few particular circumstances where county officials thought Lake fell short.
According to the AZ Capitol Times late last month, Judge John Hannah rejected the argument on the grounds that county recorders regularly include ballot affidavit envelopes in voter registration records, not always as a result of legal requirements or explicit instructions.
