Former TV anchor Kari Lake’s claim of election misconduct is moving forward in court. The Arizona Republican never conceded her loss of the 2022 gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Lake’s lawsuit contesting election results began Wednesday and continues through Friday. In it she maintains that irregularities prevented her from winning in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, which is home to more than 60 percent of the state’s voters.
The court originally threw out her filings, but the Arizona Supreme Court ordered a trial to review signature-verification procedures for mail-in ballots.
Lake’s attorney, Kurt Olsen, accused the county of falsely verifying signatures, pointing out that the rate at which they were reviewed and approved was physically impossible.
As our expert will testify, this isn’t a question of not getting it right, it’s simply, they are not physically capable of reviewing the signature both from the standpoint of being able to do an assessment with respect to the procedures, but also with respect to the functionality of the computer when the images you have to scroll down to check the record signature. You don’t see the scrolling-down function. What that log data shows, your Honor, is that over 274,000 ballots were approved at less than 3 seconds each. That includes one signature verifier who approved 100 percent of the 26,900 signatures that he verified at less than three seconds a signature. Maricopa’s log file data shows that 11 of these signature verification workers approved 170,000 signatures at a rate of between 0 and 2.99 seconds with a 99.97 percent approval rating. That’s not signature review, your Honor. Simply flashing a signature on the screen, clicking a button and moving on is not signature review. As I said, the evidence will show that Maricopa knew exactly what was going on. They could monitor each of their workers, and in fact, told them that they were being monitored.
— Attorney Ken Olsen
Olsen called into question a grand total of 334,000 mail-in ballots that were effectively unverified in the 2022 election, while Hobbs beat Lake by only 17,000 votes.
He also said that Level 2 reviewers — who double-check the rejected ballots of Level 1 staff — were so overwhelmed that they simply “kicked them back” to Level 1 for analysis. Witnesses he called verified this claim.
One of them, a whistleblower named Jacqueline Onigkeit, who worked during both the primary and general elections last year, gave incredible testimony about her curing work — which is a process by which voters are contacted about problems with their ballots in order to fix them.
With the general, I felt more of a – kind of not a sense of urgency like we did with the primary. And we worked literally to the very last day, to the very last second. Where with the general, we ended on – it would have been Tuesday, the 14th, at noon – they had us go home. Which, Wednesday was the last day at 5:00. We didn’t understand why we were leaving early when there was ballots left in the bins. And we had asked the manager, “Are you sure that you wanted us to go home? Would you like us to, you know, keep trying to call these voters to get these ballots cured?” And they said, “No.”
— Witness Jacqueline Onigkeit
Onigkeit also accused the county of neglect regarding oversight of the review and curing processes. She said staff worked with zero accountability in an environment that was wide open to abuse and fraud.
Another witness testified that he saw 298,000 mail-in envelopes that were processed in 36 hours by only 40 workers, which he called “impossible.”
We really didn’t start to see any of the election night return… data until probably Wednesday afternoon. And then by Friday, it was done. It was all 298,000. We were done with it is what we were told. Which made no sense if we could only do 60,000 or 70,000 a day. We surely couldn’t have done that in 36 hours is basically what it was.
With 298,000 envelopes coming in, and we got it done in 36 hours, the math that I based it on was that we would get – and every day they would give us an update of how many signatures came in. So typically it varied anywhere from 60,000 to maybe 75,000. Sometimes maybe 80,000… So 60,000, and you take 40 people doing signature verification a day. That’s 240 ballots. It’s going to take four to five days to do the 298,000. And it was done in 36 hours. And we’re talking about people only working, what, about 10 hours a day? So, that just doesn’t add up… And I’m at the end of this with curing, expecting, you know, a U.S. bin of rejected signatures by Level 1, Level 2, and I never got that. That’s impossible.
— Whistleblower in the Kari Lake election-integrity lawsuit
The case continues through Friday, and you can watch live coverage here.
