In 2020, the mainstream media happily sided with the Democrats to claim that the election was the safest, fairest, and most secure election in history. Illegal changes to election laws and reports of irregularities in various states were ignored, and lawsuits demanding investigations were thrown out, bizarrely, over “lack of standing,”
But two years later, another botched election in Maricopa County, Ariz., is actually getting its day in court. Failures have plagued elections in Maricopa County for a decade, and thanks to Kari Lake’s election challenge, these failures are about to be exposed.
Maricopa election officials and Lake’s Democrat opponent, Katie Hobbs, the current Secretary of State of Arizona — who certified her own election victory — tried and failed to get Lake’s lawsuit dismissed.
According to a court filing made on Sunday, Lake’s lawyer plans to call Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates to testify about how they handled the 2022 election.
While Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson dismissed eight of Lake’s 10 counts against the defendants, he permitted two counts — “Count II: Illegal Tabulator Configurations” and “Count IV: Ballot Chain of Custody” — to go to trial, which begins Wednesday.
Count II claims that the failure of ballot-on-demand printers on Election Day was intentional. “Plaintiff must show at trial that the BOD printer malfunctions were intentional, and directed to affect the results of the election, and that such actions did actually affect the outcome,” the judge wrote. This will, no doubt, be the hardest charge to prove.
Count IV claims that additional votes were allowed to be counted in violation of the County Election Manual. The judge denied the motion to dismiss this count because “whether the county complied with its own manual and applicable statutes is a dispute of fact rather than one of law.”
As Just The News notes, Maricopa County has a decade-long history of election problems. In the 2012 and 2014 elections, major delays plagued the counting of early and provisional ballots. In 2016, the county reduced the number of polling places to 60, when there had been over 200 in 2012 and 400 in 2008. These reductions generated huge voting lines. The election issues plaguing the county even caught the attention of the Obama Justice Department in 2016. Last year, a forensic audit of the presidential election found thousands of discrepancies in the county, far exceeding Joe Biden’s official margin of victory.
It is no small miracle that this lawsuit has been allowed to continue. It seemed like after the 2020 presidential election that the courts were adamantly against getting involved in election disputes — which no doubt sent a message that election shenanigans could continue unabated. But Kari Lake has a huge task ahead of her. She will have to prove her claims in court beyond a reasonable doubt. She’s long expressed confidence in her lawsuit, which is driven by whistleblowers who have come forward with complaints about how the 2022 elections were conducted. But she’s been working hard to compile evidence to prove her case.
Will the election be tossed and a new one ordered? I still say that’s highly unlikely. But this will nevertheless be Lake’s moment to bring to light the corruption and incompetence that have created problems in Arizona’s recent elections. Even if Kari Lake can’t change the outcome of the election, her efforts could go a long way toward fixing the flaws and restoring Arizonans’ confidence in their elections.
