Kari Lake Exposes the Smoking Gun in Election Misconduct Trial
On the first day of a two-day trial related to alleged irregularities in the 2022 mid-term elections in Maricopa County, brought by the Kari Lake campaign, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson heard from several witnesses who provided a disturbing picture of events that transpired on the day of the election. The most explosive testimony came from forensic election analyst Clay Parikh, who revealed malfunctioning ballot printers were deliberately altered, resulting in unacceptably long voting lines, voter confusion, compromised ballot chain of custody and voter disenfranchisement.
In other words, Lake’s witness provided the smoking gun Democrats were demanding.
During his testimony, Parikh contended that printers used in voting centers were intentionally changed on, or immediately prior to, election day, and that printer parameters were purposely changed so 19-inch ballot images were printed on 20-inch ballot paper. Since tabulators are calibrated to recognize margins set for native 20-inch ballots, all of the 19-inch ballots were rejected. Apparently, 48 of 113 ballots that were reviewed during a court-ordered examination were 19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper. While inspecting duplicate ballots, Parikh found 14 out of 15 ballots were also printed on 20-inch paper. Most importantly, Parikh claims that there is no way the printer settings could be changed without conscious intention.
Wow…
At best, the perpetrator would know that purposely altering ballots would lead to excessive delays and voter discouragement. At worst, knowing each of the spoiled ballots would have to be transferred to a duplicate ballot, a rabid partisan in a voting center might have an opportunity to alter the duplicate. It is highly coincidental that the only improperly sized ballots were printed on election day.
This evidence alone should be enough to decertify the 2022 election. One could only imagine the faux anger if such an outrageous anomaly occurred in a voting center with a minority, Democratic demographic.
Maricopa County Lost Ballot Chain of Custody
Perhaps the most damning testimony of the day came from Heather Honey, a forensic investigator and supply chain expert with more than 30 years’ experience.
Maricopa County has one of the most confusing election processes in the country. They are the only major county that uses a private, third-party entity (Runbeck) to process mail-in ballots. This greatly complicates the chain of custody, since ballots must be recorded every time they change hands, typically six times. According to Honey, the chain of custody documentation for mail in ballots prior to election day was done correctly. However, the chain of custody documentation for all the mail-in ballots cast on election day was missing in the transfer from MC-tech (Maricopa County) to Runbeck.
This means there is no way to know if the same number of ballots delivered to Runbeck were returned to Maricopa County. Incredibly, investigators were able to identify at least 50 ballots that were brought directly to Runbeck from residences and fed into the tabulators, completely circumventing proper legal requirements and procedure for tabulating ballots. If the investigators were able to identify 50 of these invalid ballots, one can only speculate how many there were in total.
The last part of Honey’s testimony focused on a ballot discrepancy between the results of mail-in ballots reported by Maricopa County Recorder, Stephen Richer, and the final tally. While Richer confirmed that 275,000 early ballots were dropped off on election day, the closing total posted several days after the election was just over 300,000. Remarkably, no one seems to have a plausible explanation as to where the extra 25,000 votes came from. Keep in mind, Kari Lake lost by only 17,000 votes.
A Flawed System Preserved by People Who Want to Keep It that Way
On November 4th, I warned Arizonans that it was entirely possible that the 2022 election would be as corrupt as 2020. As it turned out, I was wrong. Remarkably, it looks like 2022 was even worse. We can talk about rigged elections and voter fraud ad nauseam, but there was a window between 2021-2022 where the majority of these issues could have been resolved while Republicans controlled the House, Senate and governorship. Thirteen election integrity bills were introduced during that session, but eleven of the most important measures were left to languish in committee or were defeated outright.
Some powerful people appear to be perfectly happy with how Arizona runs its elections, and until citizens decide they’ve had enough and actually start participating in the election process, we should recognize that Arizona will probably be solidly blue in close races with national implications.
