After deliberating on whether to accept Kari Lake’s appeal of the dismissal of her election challenge in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, the Arizona Supreme Court issued an order on Wednesday that remanded the part of the case regarding Maricopa County’s signature verification process back to the trial court judge, and dismissed the other parts.
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Ryan Heath, an attorney who started The Gavel Project to engage in lawfare against woke ideology, has filed a lawsuit against the judge who dismissed Kari Lake’s election lawsuit. Submitted on Monday, the Writ of Mandamus demands that Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson vacate his ruling and award the election to Lake.
Heath told The Arizona Sun Times he doesn’t really know where Thompson came up with the really high bar he required Lake’s attorneys to prove in order to overturn the election. Thompson required showing by clear and convincing evidence that the misconduct was intentional and meant to change the election, was performed by one of the appropriate people in charge, and that it changed the election. Heath said this was the wrong standard, he should have relied on Reyes v. Cuming, a 1997 Arizona case involving similar circumstances, where signatures on the envelopes were not compared to the voter registration list, violating a non-technical statute.
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Correspondence from Arizona’s Office of the Attorney General months before the November 2022 general election warned of issues with Maricopa County’s signature verification of mail-in ballots.
The first letter came from Attorney General Mark Brnovich on April 16, 2022, and was directed to Senate President Karen Fann as an interim report of the Maricopa County November 3, 2020, general election.
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The State of Arizona Elections Procedures Manual (EPM) for 2019 that prescribes the Secretary of State’s rules for running an election has no provision for qualifying or certifying the equipment a third-party vendor uses for ballot signature verification in Maricopa County.
According to state law A.R.S. 16-452, the secretary of state is responsible for prescribing in an official instructions and procedures manual the rules to achieve and maintain the maximum degree of correctness, impartiality, uniformity and efficiency on the procedures for early voting and voting as well as producing, distributing, collecting, county, tabulating and storing ballots.
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In its final canvass report for the 2022 primary election, Maricopa County says it rejected 14 times more signatures than it did in the 2020 general election. This comes on the heels of Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s finding that the county’s standards for signature verification were “insufficient to guard against abuse.”
“Canvass Queen” Liz Harris, so named after conducting an 11-month long independent grassroots audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, told The Arizona Sun Times, “The entire voting system needs an entire overhaul. Period.”
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The Arizona Republican Party, along with its secretary Yvonne Cahill, has filed a lawsuit against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs over more actions she has taken that appear to be making it easier to commit voter fraud. The AZGOP’s Application for Issuance of Writ Under Exercise of Original Jurisdiction asks the court to compel Hobbs to include signature verification procedures in the election procedures manual and remove the language she added authorizing the set up of unmonitored ballot drop boxes, and challenges “no-excuse” early ballots as violating the Arizona Constitution.
AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward, who has been out on the forefront combating election fraud since the 2020 presidential election, told The Arizona Sun Times, “We want to make sure that our elections are secure so we can restore voter confidence and strengthen our representative republic.”
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Democrats have already passed H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act, in the House of Representatives; fortunately, the bill faces a much tougher road in the Senate. Among the bill’s many serious problems are a wide array that I would characterize as “mechanical,” in the sense that they dictate the nuts and bolts of how states would run elections. H.R. 1 attempts to dictate these elements in a way that is either impossible to put into effect or would gut the effective administration of elections. One example is how H.R. 1 dictates, through its Section 1621, that states must deal with signature verification – a cornerstone of election security, especially with the growth of mail-in balloting.
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