(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Arizona Republican Kari Lake sounded a defiant tone after a judge dismissed late Monday night her election integrity lawsuit that over a three-day trial had revealed dubious voter-signature verification as one of myriad problems that plagued a flawed 2022 midterm gubernatorial election handed to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
In rejecting Lake’s remaining legal claim, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Thompson ruled that Lake failed to prove that signatures on mail-in ballots were not verified as required by law. The ruling also reaffirmed the reported election of Hobbs.
Legal analysts and pundits predicted that Lake is likely to appeal the ruling, and she sent a strong signal Monday night in that direction, promising a major announcement for Tuesday.
“If you had something precious taken from you. How hard would you fight to save it?” Kari Lake War Room tweeted. “Goodnight, Arizona. Big News Coming Tomorrow.”
Big announcement tomorrow!
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) May 23, 2023
Lake lost last November’s chaotic midterm tilt by less than 17,000 voted. Over the course of the three-day trial for the election integrity lawsuit, Lake’s legal team presented key evidence and witness testimony that showed election workers had compared signatures over 270,000 times in less than three seconds, and of those 70,000 were less than two seconds.
Signature-verification specialist Erich Speckin, who analyzed the Maricopa County voter data, testified that, “I don’t believe it can be done.”
Judge Thompson reacted with indifference, writing in his ruling that “Accepting that argument would require the court to re-write not only the (Election Procedures Manual) but Arizona law to insert a minimum time for signature verification and specify the variables to be considered in the process.”
Defense attorneys representing county and state officials did little to contradict the evidence and testimony produced by Lake’s team, said UncoverDC editor Tracy Beanz.
The defense “never brought their own expert up to counter the points that you could not verify a signature in one second. They never brought a counter-expert forward to do that,” Beanz said in an interview with Charlie Kirk.
“They never said that the data was incorrect. They basically resorted to character attacks, like the Left often does.”
That assessment was echoed by Arizona Sun Times reporter and self-proclaimed “recovering election lawyer” Rachel Alexander, who covered the three-day trial from start to finish and predicted the judge’s ruling would face problems on appeal.
“It was far worse than I thought,” she tweeted of the ruling. “I don’t see how the Arizona Supreme Court doesn’t smack him down again.”
Thompson’s “short 6-page decision” was “utterly dismissive of much of what took place at the trial and ignoring the vast majority of it, IMHO relying on all the wrong law and cherrypicking the relevant statutes.”
