This past Monday, a judge out of Maricopa County issued a ruling that Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake will be able to see her day in court in order to issue her challenge to the county’s ballot chain of custody and the efficacy of voting machine tabulators and printers from the previously held midterms of 2022.
Judge Peter Thompson shot down a series of eight other claims issued by Lake via the lawsuit, but he stated that a ballot inspection could take place Tuesday at roughly 8 a.m., which comes after Lake pressed the officials of Maricopa County to make public a number of documents in relation to the elections.
“It should proceed to trial,” stated the legal representation in court for Lake, Kurt Olden, as reported by a local Fox affiliate. “The people should get to see,” adding the suit is about “restoring trust in our election system.”
“The kind of debacle that happened on November 8 should never happen,” stated Olden. “There are processes in place to make sure it doesn’t, and the defendants did not follow those processes — that’s the point, Your Honor.”
Lake claims that the widespread polling issues in Maricopa County resulted in extremely disenfranchised voters on Election Day after its Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer expressed to voters to just cast their ballots into a secure drop box or to go to another location.
Katie Hobbs, the Democratic Arizona Secretary of State, was able to allegedly garner 17,000 more statewide votes than Lake.
“Lake received the greatest number of votes and is entitled to be named the winner,” explained the lawsuit. “Alternately, the election must be re-done in Maricopa County to eliminate the effects of maladministration and illegal votes on the vote tallies reported by Maricopa County.”
As the most heavily populated county in the state, Maricopa County had quite a few issues back on November 8th during the elections, such as printer and tabulation machine-related issues in at least 70 of the county’s 223 polling locations. Lake has made the claim that there had been breakdowns for tabulators at roughly 59% of the county’s voting centers for Election Day.
The court officially granted Lake’s request to look over a selection of ballots from the county for this previous election.
Those ballots will include a total of 150 randomly selected early ballots, “ballot-on-demand” printed ballots, and “ballot-on-demand” printed ballots that have been labeled as spoiled that day out of six voting centers from Maricopa County that were chosen by Lake’s representative.
The legal team for Hobbs made the argument that her former opponent lacks any evidence at all to prop up the allegations.
“In the end, Your Honor, if there is anything rotten in Arizona, it is what this contest represents,” stated Abha Khanna, as explained by local media outlets. “For the past several years our democracy and its basic guiding principles have been under sustained assault from candidates who just cannot or will not accept the fact that they lost.”
A meeting is currently slated to take place on the 22nd of December.
