Kari Lake, a former candidate for governor of Arizona on the Republican ticket, has filed a new appeal with the state’s highest court regarding election-related litigation that calls into doubt the veracity of thousands of ballots.
According to Just the News, on the second page of Lake’s appeal, her counsel assert that at least 8,000 ballots were illegible and were not “duplicated or counted.”
“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 previous week, the former Phoenix-area newscaster claimed 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.”
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. pic.twitter.com/IUOL2GyG0a
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) July 15, 2023
According to AZPM, the decision to transfer her case to Tucson was founded on a state statute that “permits the Phoenix Appeals Court to arbitrarily transfer cases to Tucson in order to reduce its workload.”
Lake has previously threatened to take her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
According to NBC News, she is also considering challenging Senator Kirsten Sinema (I-Arizona) in the impending election.
Nonetheless, she has made it clear that she remains committed to resolving 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 Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona, Lake has been contesting the 2022 election results in court. She asserts that numerous Republican voters in Maricopa County were unable to exercise their right to vote on Election Day due to malfunctioning voting systems at more than 60 percent of polling locations.
She also expressed concern regarding significant problems with the signature verification process for mail-in ballots.
A judge in Maricopa County ruled last week that he would not prevent Lake from examining vote affidavit envelopes from the 2016 election, as part of Lake’s ongoing fight against what she perceives to be fraudulent acts that she claims contributed to her loss.
Attorneys for Maricopa County had argued that the signatures on the ballot affidavit are confidential because they are a vital part of the voter registration record, which is protected by state law, with the exception of a few specific instances where county officials believed Lake fell short.
According to the AZ Capitol Times, late last month, Judge John Hannah rejected the argument based on the fact that county recorders routinely include ballot affidavit envelopes in voter registration records, though not always due to legal requirements or explicit instructions.