Following 10 months of court battles related to the results of the 2022 midterm elections, Arizona Republican Kari Lake has filed yet another appeal in the ruling connected to her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Lake has repeatedly claimed that the election for governor, which she narrowly lost to Hobbs, was tainted by misconduct that included malfunctioning election systems and improper signature verification of early voting ballots. She has launched multiple efforts to overturn the results through Arizona’s state court system but has been unsuccessful every time.
Most recently, she filed an appeal of a court ruling that she lost in May, according to the Arizona Republic. That appeal, which dealt with election issues in Maricopa County, was transferred to an appeals court based in Tucson.
Lake’s opening brief in the case says there is new evidence to support her allegations.
“New evidence demonstrates that Maricopa falsely certified its 446 vote-center tabulators passed mandatory L&A certification testing prior to Election Day and strongly suggests Maricopa planned the Election Day debacle,” the brief filed with the court said. L&A stands for “logic and accuracy.”
“That matters because “misconfigured and defective BOD-printed ballots caused Maricopa’s vote-center tabulators to reject tens of thousands of ballots, which would have been prevented by proper L&A testing.” BOD stands for “ballot on demand.”
The filing said that “The ensuing chaos led to massive lines and wait times, thereby impairing or depriving the right to vote of tens of thousands of predominately Republican voters.”
“Arizona elections are now in uncharted territory,” the filing said. “New evidence produced by Maricopa County … strongly suggests that Maricopa officials intentionally sabotaged the 2022 General Election, then gave false testimony attempting to cover up their misconduct.”
Even viewed in the light most favorable to Maricopa, the evidence shows Maricopa intentionally failed to conduct logic and accuracy (‘L&A’) testing” required by law and “altered the election equipment thereby rendering the election irredeemably flawed.“
The filing said, “after Maricopa conducted its falsely ‘certified’ L&A testing on October 11, 2022, Maricopa conducted unannounced and unlawful testing on all 446 vote-center tabulators on October 14, 17, and 18. The tabulator system log files show that 260 of the vote-center tabulators rejected ballots with the same tabulator error codes that occurred on Election Day. In other words, this evidence supports a conclusion that Maricopa’s unannounced and unlawful testing was a dry run for the Election Day debacle.”
The filing added that “Maricopa officials admitted, seven months after the fact, that between October 14-18, 2022, they swapped out the memory cards and the election software installed on Maricopa’s 446 vote-center tabulators with “reformatted memory cards” that purportedly contained election software supposedly previously tested on other equipment. Maricopa did not perform L&A testing on these 446 tabulators after swapping out the elections software and memory cards as required,” and called the October testing “simply kabuki theatre.”
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