Summary of the "evidence" presented by Lake's attorney (from AZ Republic columnist Laurie Roberts):
- A whistleblower from Runbeck Elections Services, the county’s election contractor, who didn’t testify but instead avowed to a Lake investigator that she saw fellow employees bring in 50 early ballots of family members and illegally add them to the vote total. Lake lost to Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs by 17,117 votes.
- A partisan pollster calling himself the “People’s Pundit” – a guy whose polling firm, Big Data Poll, scored an F rating from the poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight – who did an exit poll of 813 Maricopa County voters and from that somehow concluded that 15,603 to 29,257 Lake supporters didn’t vote due to Election Day problems. “I believe it was substantial enough to change the leaderboard,” Rich Baris testified.
- Sworn declarations from 200 voters who said they were impacted by Election Day problems. But only three of them, according to the county, didn’t vote and that was their choice. Declining to wait in line or put your ballot in a secure box, to be counted later, is not evidence of disenfranchised voters.
- And finally, a cyber security expert who testified that the county’s printers were set up to spit out 19-inch ballots on 20-inch paper – ballots that then couldn’t be counted. Except, he conceded that they would have been counted. When a ballot can’t be read by a vote center tabulator, he acknowledged it’s sent to a bipartisan board of workers that transfers the voter’s choices onto a fresh ballot so it can be tabulated.
After the court Kari Lake told reporters: “We proved without a shadow of a doubt that there was malicious intent that caused disruptions so great it changed the results of the election,”
Something was proved without a shadow of doubt in Kari Lake's trial, all right. And it should be followed up with sanctions.
www.azcentral.com
That's pretty much what I was expecting the outcome to be.
I touched on it in another thread (or maybe it was this one?)
Nobody is expecting any election to be 100% error free or 100% air tight. However, when it comes to something that would warrant overturning results or scrapping the results and calling for a mulligan, it needs to be sufficiently demonstrated that the volume of irregularities were so great, that it would've shifted the outcome.
Lake's case (and original gripe) fell way short of that.
It's always been well understood that there are always a few outlier irregularities, it's impossible for their not to be when dealing with counting massive numbers of votes with a lot of moving parts in the process. However, in these past few election cycles, it's become the GOP strategy du jour to claim that any irregularity that happens in an election where they lose, no matter how insignificant, is grounds for throwing the entire result away and having "Election Day 2".
In a state with 7 million people, where the difference in votes between the candidates is in the tens of thousands, a small scale exit poll and a person claiming they saw someone else improperly add 50 ballots to the totals, and a few others saying they didn't want to wait in line to vote hardly meets the criteria for any thing as drastic as a do-over.
That last one is particularly ironic the more I think about it...
Many GOP folks are often dismissive about it when Democrats bring up the fact that making large numbers of people in Black neighborhoods wait for hours in line to vote is a form of voter suppression/disenfranchisement. Often times with rebuttals in the theme of "well, if voting is that important to you, you'll make time and wait however long it takes", they don't even want people bringing them food or water while they wait.
Yet, 3 people on their side claim that happened to them, and now all of the sudden, not only is "having to wait a while" disenfranchisement, but apparently warrants throwing the entire result away, and dragging millions of voters back out to the polls again for a complete do-over.
kjzz.org
www.12news.com
