Kari Lake’s legal team has reportedly uncovered new evidence that is said to support a cybersecurity expert’s bombshell findings that exposed intentional misconduct in Maricopa County.
The emergence of the “new and compelling evidence” was revealed in an explosive new court filing from Lake’s attorneys.
In light of the new evidence, the Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate’s lawyers have asked the state Superior Court to review a decision from December that threw out her claims about printing problems.
The ballot printing issues plagued the state’s most populous county on Election Day, specifically in Republican-voting areas.
Lake’s “new and compelling evidence” supports a cybersecurity expert’s findings that happened in Maricopa County on Nov. 8 was the result of intentional misconduct, according to the filing.
That misconduct amounted to sabotage of the voting system on behalf of the Democrat candidate who now holds the governor’s office, the cybersecurity expert found.
The filing related to a Dec. 24 decision by Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson.
Thompson dismissed Lake’s argument that misconduct by Maricopa County election officials warranted challenging the razor-close results.
The race was so close that Lake lost to current Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs by only about 17,000 votes out of 2.5 million that were cast.
But Lake has refused to roll over and has stayed in the game.
Lake’s latest legal filing presents new evidence for the cybersecurity expert’s findings that Maricopa County officials had not only engaged in misconduct on Election Day but lied about it during reviews of the process.
The filing rests largely on the findings of Clay U. Parikh, the same expert whose testimony was discounted in the December court decision.
It presents evidence that Lake’s lawyers say was not available for the earlier trial, including a review of election center printer issues that was not released until April 10.
And if it holds up, it could well be the smoking gun clue that overturns the Hobbs election.
In an “Exhibit A” declaration in Lake’s filing, Parikh described how records that have become available since the December decision indicate the Maricopa County Elections Department and the Arizona Secretary of State’s office had falsely certified election voting center tabulators.
The failure of those same tabulators caused havoc in the county on November 8.
Hobbs was Secretary of State at the time of the November election and refused to recuse herself as Arizona’s top election official before voters went to the polls.
If there was underhanded behavior afoot that was benefitting the Democrat candidate for governor, Hobbs’ secretary of state’s office would have been responsible for it.
The county elections office and the secretary of state’s office claimed that the equipment had been tested in public on October 11 and met the requirements of the state’s Elections Procedure Manual.
However, Parikh’s statement declares:
“The only testing of the 445 voting center tabulators with the same election project as that used on Election Day … (as required by the EPM) occurred on October 14, 17th, or 18th, after Maricopa County and the Secretary of State had already signed L&A testing certifications, which must now be considered fraudulent.”
In addition, Parikh stated that the testing done out of public view used a far smaller sample size than was needed.
He also showed that the machines were ripe for failure.
All of that adds up to the charge that the problems that Kari Lake contends kept her from winning the governor’s office were essentially deliberate:
“Following the tests of October 14, 17, and 18, and with the failed state of the tabulators preserved, Maricopa County knowingly and intentionally, or with reckless disregard, distributed the tabulators to voting centers for use on ElectionDay,” Parikh’s executive summary states.
Maricopa County insists that the notorious ballot printing problems were largely attributed to improper settings.
But Parikh sees something far more sinister:
They were not only predictable, because they had emerged in what little testing was done before the election, but were also much more widespread than the county has acknowledged.
According to Parikh, the evidence proves that the issues were deliberate.
One major problem involved 19-inch ballots being printed on 20-inch paper, which made their image too small for the tabulators to read, according to Parikh’s statement.
The county claimed that was a technical issue caused by an inadvertent setting made by a technician or technicians and involved only a small number of votes that ended up being counted anyway.
But Parikh’s statement, citing the report released in April, noted that the error occurred much more often than the county acknowledged.
The error occurred in the middle of batches of ballots being printed.
And, most importantly, it occurred on printers made by two different manufacturers.
Parikh’s statement declares that the evidence proves that the “issues” were part of a deliberate plan, not human error or technical malfunction.
“The only cause of this is erroneous code/malware or remote configuration changes,” the statement notes.
