12.24.22 | Arizona Midterms Are Unsettling, And Possibly Unsettled

First and foremost - Merry Christmas! With the holiday afoot, I am going to keep this as brief as possible. I wish you and your families the very best, and thank you for reading. It would mean a great deal to me if you would share this story with just one person who might appreciate it. Thank you in advance, and enjoy!

This week’s installment will cover the details of the botched Arizona Midterm election, and what Kari Lake’s team is doing to expose it, with the ultimate goal of overturning the results. At this time the current Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, has already certified herself the winner in the 2022 race even though she was both a candidate and a top overseer.

Kari Lake, her opponent, pegged an “election denier” from day one, is the first person to be granted the right to present evidence of election interference to any courtroom since 2020. Sounds like a strange statement, right? Weren’t there 60-some-odd cases that were heard following the 2020 election, declaring it “the safest and most secure election in history"?

The truth is that not one of these cases made it to a trial. Every single one was dismissed by early motions, lack of standing, the judge declaring it “moot” or “laches”, basically anything legalese to stop the claims. Not a single case ever actually made it to an “evidentiary hearing” where evidence is allowed to be admitted and witnesses are permitted to testify. Not one.

With whistleblowers from within Maricopa & their contractor filing affidavits in support of the contest, Kari Lake has legitimate claims against the results of the Arizona election. But truth be told, the fact that she was permitted to head to trial alone is of historic significance regardless of the outcome.

Now to get into the case...

You already know Kari Lake (R) was running against Katie Hobbs (D) who was simultaneously the state’s Secretary of State (the top election official in AZ). But there are two other “players” that will need to be introduced; Maricopa County, the largest and most Democrat county in the state, and Runbeck Election Services, the subcontractor used by the county to handle ballots and supply election tabulation equipment.

Runbeck Election Services is an election equipment supplier to both AZ and GA (another state rife with election integrity issues). Mr. Runbeck and his wife are regular Democrat PAC donors, including one named the “Stop Republicans PAC” and give frequently to ActBlue. He has been spotted hob-knobbing with various elite Democrats in DC, Illinois, California, and various other strongholds of the Party. It is clear that Runbeck is not only a top supplier of election equipment in the US, but the family and company is deeply intertwined with the inner-workings of the Democrat Party.

In Maricopa County Arizona, Runbeck was sub-contracted to handle ballots. Essentially, because Arizona has so many mail-in ballots, Maricopa County poll workers were unable to verify all of the signatures on the ballot envelopes with the voter registration records, as required by law. To solve this problem, Runbeck offered a solution where all ballot envelopes would be scanned by Runbeck at their facility, the digital scans of the signatures would be quickly verified using these computer systems, and then the verified envelopes (containing ballots) were sent back to Maricopa County to be opened and counted. This is all detailed in Maricopa County elections procedure, and there are extremely specific regulations when it comes to something called “Chain of Custody.”

Because elections are so sensitive and require a great deal of trust, there are a huge amount of laws and processes that must be followed. Included in these are chain of custody documents. These simple forms keep a tally of how many ballots (or envelopes) are in a bunch, where they are heading (to and from), and all parties involved with handling them. There is also an official seal on each bag or box to verify the contents were not tampered with. Since 2020, there has been a massive amount of debate and regulation added to these processes due to the great deal of accusations made between then and now. The procedures are clear and thorough.

Before we get to the allegations, there is one more detail that must be mentioned. In addition to mail-in ballots that were submitted by the voter and mailed in via USPS, there were also “mail-in” ballots that were NOT mailed in, and instead were dropped off by the voter in a drop-box on election day. These are referred to as “Early Voter Election Day” (EVED) ballots, as the voter requested an early ballot but returned it on Election Day. These are the exact type of ballots that have been called into question regarding their chain of custody.

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Whistleblowers from Maricopa County and Runbeck Election Services have submitted sworn affidavits to Lake’s team claiming there were issues with both documents and seals pertaining to these specific ballot’s chain of custody. They state that batches of EVED ballots were arriving at Runbeck for scanning without any documentation and no seals. Ballots would be frantically unloaded and immediately taken for scanning with disregard for procedure.

When Lake’s expert witness reviewed 100% of the available chain of custody documents for the 2022 Midterms, which are public record, she found that over 300,000 EVED ballots had NO chain of custody documents. These were the same ballots described by the whistleblowers. When these documents were specifically mentioned as missing, and formally requested multiple times, Maricopa responded by claiming the documents were “lost.” This fact was echoed during trial, and no real resolution nor excuse was offered by the County. Because of this break in the chain of custody, there is no way of telling whether or not these 300k ballots were legal ballots, or if they had possibly been tampered with.

Poll workers and public observers have no record of where these ballots were retrieved, where they had gone, when they had arrived, and how many there were.

The other claim in Lake’s lawsuit pertained to the huge amount of issues that happened on Election Day. If you were following the new in early November, Arizona was the BEST example of the WORST way to run an election. There were heaps of reports explaining that tabulators were not able to read ballots in GOP dominated strongholds. Because of the tabulation issues, not only was trust completely undermined, but long lines started to form, poll workers began to panic, and some vote centers were even shut down. The Lake team argues that these issues and subsequent shutdowns / long lines were intentional, and meant to dissuade GOP voters in those areas from voting. They have hundreds of sworn affidavits from disenfranchised Arizona voters saying the same.

At the time, we did not know what was causing the tabulation issues, but by midday the Elections Supervisor, Bill Gates (not the Microsoft guy, different guy), held a presser and shared that “printers were low on ink, and tabulators were not able to read the faint images printed on the ballots". As you will learn, this did not turn out to be accurate. (Printers are required because ballots in Arizona are printed “on demand,” so a voter signs in, has their ballot printed on demand, then completes the ballot and inserts it into the tabulator. My state, CT, does not use ballots printed on-demand, so I was a bit confused by the role of printers at first.)

Here is video of tabulator issues from election day, this happened at 57% of vote centers in Arizona, the majority of which were in Republican communities:

Below is testimony by cyber expert who worked for 9 years at very same lab that certifies Maricopa machines;

“Machine failures Arizona voters experienced on Election Day could not have occurred absent intentional misconduct.”

After making her claims to the court, and being battered with Motions to Dismiss from Katie Hobbs, Maricopa County, and many of the Elections Board of Supervisors, the Judge ruled that Kari Lake’s lawsuit would be granted a 2-day trial. Again, this decision alone is a massive win for those that have been labeled “election denying conspiracy theorists” for about 3 years now. The disingenuous attempt to toss the suit was thwarted because the issues with the Arizona election were so plentiful and obvious that the Judge could not, in good faith, dismiss these claims.

It is important to note that when an election is contested in Arizona, the incumbent official keeps their post until the contests have been settled. A Judge DOES have the ability to nullify the existing certification that named Katie Hobbs Gov-elect (which she herself signed as SoS), and may award the victory to Kari Lake on the spot as a result of the trial. This is the ultimate goal of Lake’s lawsuit.

Here is the relevant statute:

To be fair, the Judge DID dismiss 8 of 10 total claims brought by Lake. These claims are detailed on my Twitter if you’d like to see everything that was dismissed. For the purposes of this article, I will cover the claims that the Judge will allow to be heard in trial, which are Claims 2 and 4.

Here is what Lake’s team will need to prove according to the judge:

In another atypical ruling, the Judge also awarded Lake’s team access to inspect ballots prior to the trial, as the integrity of the ballots was one of the issues raised in her claims. Typically it is extremely rare for a judge to allow ballot inspection, for fear that “Personal Identifying Information” (PII) would be made public. Thankfully in Arizona there is no PII on ballots, only the envelopes. Even though signature verification was iffy and Lake’s team claimed over 6,000 signatures were invalid (This was one of the claims dismissed before trial), they were still specifically disallowed from viewing the envelopes that ballots are submitted in, as these contain signatures (which is PII). What the results of the subsequent ballot inspection show are extremely alarming…

Lake’s expert was given the right to inspect 150 total random ballots from a random selection of 6 vote centers in the county (there are over 200). Upon inspection, it was found that MORE THAN HALF of the random sample were spoiled ballots, and were unable to be tabulated on election day nor when they tried running through the tabulator again during this pre-trial inspection.

It was determined that printers were printing a 19” ballot image on 20” ballot paper. As it turned out, the current excuse of “low ink” was not substantiated and was not found to be the cause of the issues. The printers were set to “shrink-image-to-fit” setting which reduced the size of the printed image, changed the margins and tabulation borders, which rendered them impossible to read by the machines. During the “stress testing” done the day prior to election day, not one single issue was reported. The very next day, Election Day, 57% of vote centers were having tabulation issues, now determined to be the result of altered printer settings.

Here is an image from the inspection of a scaled-down image (19”) vs a 20” ballot printed properly. The ballot on the left could not be read:

Once it was revealed to the court that this was the issue creating tabulation issues on Election Day, there appeared to be a change of story from the Defense. Specifically, from a key elections official and witness called by the Defense themselves; Scott Jarrett.

Watch the two videos below, the first from Day 1 of trial, and the second from Day 2 of trial. You will notice that his story not only changes from being unaware of the issue and claiming it is impossible…to the fact that he knew about it, is working on a report about it, hasn’t documented nor published anything yet apparently to keep it secret, and also adds that this same issue happened in 3 previous elections leading up to this election.

Day 1: “Impossible, couldn’t happen”:

Day 2: “We are aware of the issue, also it happened in 2020 Primary, 2020 General, and 2022 Primary, but conveniently it has not been documented at all”:

All this seems pretty intentional to me, and that is exactly what the Judge had declared Lake needed to prove to win her case. Those are the most important facts surrounding Claim 2.

Now on to Claim 4…

Claim 4 alleged that chain of custody for 300,000 ballots was missing, which was confirmed during trial. Maricopa County did not have the proper documentation for these 300,000 ballots and claimed it was “lost.” Attempting to dismiss this error on the County’s part, the defense attorney asked Lake’s expert witness, Heather Honey, to posit: Even if these ballots have no chain of custody, and were harvested…they were still scanned, and they are still legal ballots, correct?

Without hesitation the expert corrected him, “They are invalid ballots,” implying they are not legal and may not be counted.

Watch this “mic drop” moment from Heather Honey below:

Now, there is one other fact that should be mentioned to explain why these 300,000 ballots specifically are to be extra concerning, beyond just the missing documentation. On election night, Maricopa County put out an estimate of the number of EVED ballots they had received and transported to Runbeck for processing. That number was “275,000+” ballots. Including a rough count may seem reasonable, but it is against Arizona election procedure, as all batches of ballots must have exact counts included on their documentation. Outstanding ballot figures communicated by the County to the public should be exact to the number. Especially when the Arizona count is delaying nationwide conclusions, as it did for weeks.

Upon envelopes being scanned by Runbeck and returned to Maricopa County for tabulating, the number of ballots in this batch was increased (2 days after Election Day, I might add) to now 298,000 ballots.

This is an addition of 23,000 ballots which were not originally accounted for by the County’s own (shoddy and rough) reporting, and the missing documentation for this specific batch of ballots makes this jump in ballots all the more disconcerting.

Combine this with the facts that Kari Lake only “lost” by 17,000 votes, and Republicans are notorious for wanting to vote on election day… This discrepancy could be more than enough to have flipped the election as it is assumed the majority of those 300,000 ballots were from Republican voters.

So, now we’ve heard the claims, we’ve seen the evidence, and we’ve heard the testimony. The only thing left to do is hear the ruling from the Judge.

Throughout the hearing Judge Peter A. Thompson remained measured, soft spoken, and unbiased. He gave leeway to both sides equally, and it was my personal impression that no one could honestly claim this was an unfair trial. Following closing arguments by both sides, Judge Thompson stated he would need time to review the details, and would issue his ruling “forthwith.”

As of Friday evening, December 23rd, the ruling has not been released.