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Dec. 26, 2022 - Epoch Times
15:43
Arizona Election Lawsuit REVEALS Un-Disclosed Ballot Printing Issues
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While almost all of the midterm elections across the entire country have now been resolved one way or the other, well, there is a notable exception, the state of Arizona.
Over there, Ms.
Carrie Lake is currently pushing forward a lawsuit which aims to either have her declare the winner or, at the very least, to vacate the results and to hold a new election.
You see, earlier this month, Carrie Lake's legal team submitted this 70-page lawsuit right here.
You can see it up on screen.
It was filed against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, against Mr.
Stephen Richer, who is the county recorder, against Mr.
Scott Jarrett, the elections co-director, as well as against Ms.
Katie Hobbs, who, interestingly enough, is both the Secretary of State as well as the Democratic candidate for governor.
Meaning, just as an aside, that Katie Hobbs was ultimately running for governor in an election that she herself was in charge of administering.
That's very cool.
Regardless, though, getting back to the 70-page lawsuit, it was essentially saying that Carrie Lake's legal team had gathered evidence after the election which showed that, quote, In total, this lawsuit had 10 specific claims that Carrie Lake's legal team were bringing up against the defendants.
However, the judge presiding over the case, who for your reference is named Judge Peter Thompson, he was appointed to the bench by a former Republican governor in Arizona, he actually threw out eight of the claims and only allowed two of them to proceed to trial.
And so when you look inside of the lawsuit, the only two claims that were not dismissed were claims number two and number four, which dealt with the machine tabulator issues as well as with the issues related to the ballot chain of custody.
In regards to the tabulators, Carrie Lake's legal team, in their lawsuit, alleged that these problems, quote, could not have occurred absent intentional misconduct, and that, quote, thousands of voters, disproportionately Republican, gave up voting due to long wait times.
However, this tabulator business requires a little bit of backstory.
And it also requires you to smash that like button so this video can be shared out to other people.
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Now, if you remember, back on November the 8th, which was election day itself, very early in the morning, reports began to come out of the state of Arizona of people having trouble voting in person.
As just one example of what I mean by that, someone I personally know in Maricopa County, who himself went over to the city of Phoenix to vote, he sent me a photo of what he saw at his polling station.
You can see the photo up on screen for yourself.
It's a little piece of paper that was posted on the wall, which says this, quote, We are experiencing technical difficulties.
Our tabulators, the ballot scanners, are now working.
If you vote here, your ballot will be collected to be tabulated later.
Or you can go to a nearby site that is working.
Then, right below it listed several close-by polling stations.
And indeed, these anecdotal reports coming out of Arizona, which were being posted on social media, were soon confirmed by officials in Maricopa County, who came out and announced that the tabulators in about 20% of the polling sites were, for some reason, malfunctioning.
Here's specifically what the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a man by the name of Bill Gates, said as a part of a statement to the press.
In about 20% of the vote centers, again, we have 223 vote centers across the county.
In about 20% of those, when people will go and they try and He then further went on to say that this was not actually stopping people from voting, since instead of running the ballots through the tabulator machines, they were able to instead throw them into a dropbox to be counted later.
Here's specifically what he added.
But this is something we've prepared for.
We have a redundancy.
If the ballot will not go through this tabulator, and by the way, those ballots that go through this tabulator, they go back here in the machine.
If their ballot's not going through the tabulator, then we will ask them to go here at door number three and place their ballot into this secure box.
Those ballots will remain secure in there all day long.
And at the end of voting, after 7 p.m., when everything is completed, then these ballots will be taken out securely and delivered by a bipartisan team, so Republican and Democrat, down to here at the Central Tabulation Center, where they will be tabulated.
Essentially, all the Arizonians who decided to wait to vote on Election Day and happened to go to one of these affected sites, they were given one of three options.
They could either wait around for the tabulator to come back online, they could drop their ballots into slot number three on the tabulator machine, or they could drive to another polling location.
However, if that person happened to have a job or happened to have kids, And they didn't have time to just wait around or drive around the city, well, their only real option was to drop their ballots into slot number three, which is exactly what about 17,000 people wound up doing.
And coincidentally, 17,000 was also the gap between Carrie Lake and Katie Hobbs.
Probably just a coincidence, though.
Regardless, the big question here is why did this occur?
How could it be that 20% of the tabulators suddenly had issues on Election Day?
Well, eventually, the elected officials came out once again and said that they had found the problem, which allegedly had something to do with the printers not printing darkly enough.
Here was an updated statement from the Maricopa County officials.
Maricopa County has identified the solution for the tabulation issues at about 60 vote centers.
County technicians have changed the printer settings, which seems to have resolved the issue.
It appears some of the printers were not producing dark enough timing marks on the ballots.
That statement was made on Election Day.
However, it appears that ballots not being printed darkly enough was not the only reason they were being rejected.
That's because just yesterday, during the actual trial, during Cary Lake's actual trial, testimony came out revealing another reason that the ballots were getting rejected by the machines.
Apparently, on the 20-inch paper, somehow they were printing 19-inch ballots, meaning they were missized and weren't able to be read by the machines.
Here is how a cybersecurity expert, Mr.
Mr. Clay Parrick, testifying on the witness stand, described it.
I have to point out is out of all the spoiled ballots and the duplicated original ballots, There were a total of 113 ballots examined.
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Then, after Mr.
Perrick's testimony, Mr.
Scott Jarrett, the Maricopa County Elections co-director, he was asked about this missizing issue as well.
And here's what he said.
When we started doing the audit reconciliation of those door three ballots, we identified some of those ballots had then a fit to paper issue.
And when was that?
I don't remember the exact dates, but a few days after Election Day.
Does it say fit to print issue was the cause or words to that effect on those forms?
It actually is using the term shrink to fit, not fit to fit.
Shrink to fit.
And was that determined to be the cause, or was that an assumption as a possibility?
It was determined to be the cause for those three locations, for the ones that wouldn't be read at the voting location and then be read at Central County.
And again, you did not mention this in your testimony yesterday, did you?
I did not.
Did you publish anywhere that there was this shrink-to-fit issue after the election?
We've not.
So you didn't tell the public, hey, we've discovered.
I mean, you're performing a root cause analysis and you find out that there was this shrink-to-fit issue that gave rise to Mr.
Jarrett then went on further to explain that the reason that these shrunken ballots existed was because at three of the county's election sites, the technicians were trying to fix the toner problem, the problem of the marks not being dark enough, and selected the shrink-to-print setting, which instead of solving the toner problem, We'll end up actually printing 1,300 ballots, which were too small to read.
But Mr.
Jarrett went on to say that the voters at these polling locations were now disenfranchised because they all had the option to throw their ballots into slot number three to be counted later at central processing.
Here's specifically what he said, again, on the witness stand.
Again, we didn't have ballots rejected by tabulators.
They were not being read in by tabulators.
But that's not a disruption when voters still had valid options to participate in dropping in those ballots in our secure door number three, which is a similar process that eight other counties use as their only option for voters to be able to return their ballots.
Now, of course, the problem here, and it's something that Mr.
Jarrett is potentially missing in either his statement or maybe his understanding, is that there are certain individuals, certain voters in Arizona, that just don't trust the Dropbox method.
That's, in fact, potentially why they've waited all the way up until Election Day to vote in person, in order to have their ballots processed right there in front of them.
And so, to say that they were not disenfranchised because they had such an option to throw their ballot into slot number three might be technically true, but it misses the broader point that some individuals, because of these problems, wound up traveling from polling site to polling site in order to vote.
And for some of them, every polling site they went to appeared to have the same problem.
Here is, for instance, the testimony of one election clerk, again, given at the Cary Lake trial.
I was an election clerk for the midterm election.
On election day, we had several voters come into our site reporting that they had already visited up to three separate voting locations where the printers and our machines were not working properly.
Approximately 20% of the 223 voting centers in Maricopa County had issues.
That is one in five locations where people were turned away due to utter incompetence.
Now, another aspect of this case is that Cary Lake's legal team is also claiming that employees at a company called Runback, which is a Maricopa County ballot processing contractor, had allegedly improperly inserted their own ballots, as well as those of their family members, into the batches which were supposed to be counted on site.
Here is, for instance, what Ms.
Heather Honey, who was testifying on Cary Lake's team's behalf, here is what she said she found after speaking to an employee at this particular contractor.
Did she also tell you about possible vulnerabilities where people can inject ballots into this system?
Right.
So she said that run-back employees were permitted, almost like it was a perk of employment, to bring their ballots from home.
So their ballots from home, their family members' ballots, bring them from home and add them to the inbound scans.
Is that...
Is that consistent with the Arizona law?
No.
So she calls for a legal conclusion?
You're asking for her understanding, correct?
Yes, Your Honor.
Your understanding, ma'am, if you can answer it based on that.
It is my understanding that ballots must be returned to an authorized drop-off location.
Maricopa County publishes a list of those authorized drop-off locations.
In total, Heather said that the employee she spoke with claimed that she saw at least 50 ballots added to the Maricopa County's count in this particular way.
However, she added that she did not have direct knowledge of any more ballots other than these 50 being improperly added.
However, in response, Mr.
Ray Valenzuela...
The Maricopa County co-director of elections, as well as the man in charge of early voting within Maricopa County, he said that the county never authorized Runback employees to deliver ballots directly, like it's being alleged they did, and also he's not aware that any of their employees ever did so.
Take a listen.
Has the county ever authorized Runback to allow its employees to deliver their own early ballot packets directly to Runback?
No.
And are you aware of Runback allowing its employees to do so in the past?
No.
And so you kind of get an idea from these exchanges about how this case generally went.
For two straight days, Carrie Lake's legal team presented allegations and Maricopa presented explanations.
And after all was said and done, Mr.
Kurt Olson, one of Carrie Lake's attorneys, concluded by saying this, quote, This is about trust, Your Honor.
It's about restoring people's trust.
There is not a person that's watching this thing that isn't shaking their head now.
On the flip side, however, Ms.
Abba Khanna, one of Katie Hobbs' attorneys, she had a much different take, telling the courtroom, as well as the presiding judge, that Carrie Lake's team have not established whether the problems with the printers were intentional or not, whether they would have changed their race's outcome, whether they would have changed the result of the election, and then she added this, quote, And in terms of how it will ultimately turn out, well, that is up for the judge to decide.
For your reference, the judge did not say when he would issue a ruling on the case, but likely, within the next week, we will have a ruling one way or the other.
Regardless, though, there was a lot more to this case that we didn't discuss in today's report, such as potential issues with the signature verification process, the long waiting lines at the polling locations, among several other issues.
If you would like to watch the court proceedings in their very long entirety, well, I'll throw several links down into the description box below where you can find the 8 or 10-plus hours of actual courtroom footage.
Maybe you can spend Christmas with your family sitting around the Christmas tree drinking eggnog, watching through all of them together.
It might be fun.
And also, all I ask in return is that maybe, for the last time this year even, you vote with your finger, not by mail, not by Dropbox, but in person, with your finger, and you destroy that like button.
Because by smashing that like button, you are voting to have this video shared out to ever more people.
And in this election, you can actually vote twice, because you can also smash that subscribe button as well and receive our news content every time we publish it.
And then, until next time, from all of us here at the Epoch Times, Merry Christmas to you and your family.
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