Two weeks after filing a complaint requesting data from the 2022 midterm election in Maricopa County, gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has filed another lawsuit against election officials contesting the election results, alleging voter disenfranchisement and suppression. Lake called for a forensic audit of the printer-tabulator problems, an inspection of ballots and voter registration records, including signatures, disqualification of illegal votes, and redoing the election as well as other relief.
Kurt Olsen, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, told The Arizona Sun Times he believes the election anomalies were “intentional since they didn’t test all of their equipment and follow the appropriate processes when problems arose.” He asked, “Why haven’t they done their own forensic audit 30 days later?”
He said Maricopa County officials’ cavalier attitude about the problems and their lack of trying to find out what happened is telling. “Does anybody believe this widespread failure, oh shucks, just happened?” he wondered.
The complaint alleged that the number of illegal votes cast in the election “far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin” between the two candidates, a difference of .67 percent. It said Democrat Katie Hobbs did not receive the highest number of votes due to illegal votes.
Clay Parikh, a cyber expert who has extensive experience performing security tests on voting systems, including the type used in Maricopa County, stated that due to the lack of certification of some of the voting systems, the numerous procedural violations, the widespread failure of the tabulation process, the failure to provide proper instructions to handle the problem after it started, and the incorrect explanations given to the public, the election failures “can only be described as intentional.”
The complaint alleged that “tens of thousands of mail-in and drop box ballots” did not satisfy signature requirements. Three Maricopa County signature verification employees signed affidavits stating that they rejected signatures as mismatching up to 40 percent of the time. However, when they showed up for work the next day, they would see only about 10 percent of those ballots reappear for signature curing. One of the reviewers believes a manager was approving the mismatched ballots instead.
