Update:

Maricopa County Superior Judge Peter Thompson ruled that two of Kari Lake’s 10 different claims can go to trial. The claims allowed by Judge Thompson involve the breakdowns/malfunctioning of printers, along with Election Day and ballot chain of custody issues. Lake’s lawsuit alleged that between 15,603 and 29,257 Republicans were disenfranchised who would have likely voted for Lake, according to a calculation performed by data analyst Richard Baris of Big Data Poll who surveyed voters about whether they experienced problems on Election Day.

Judge Thompson has ruled that a two-day trial will be taking place before Jan. 2, adding that Hobbs and County Recorder Stephen Richer would be required to testify as Lake wished. Lake has “alleged intentional misconduct sufficient to affect the outcome of the election and thus has stated an issue of fact that requires going beyond the pleadings,” the ruling stated. During the trial, Lake’s team must be able to prove that printers were both intentionally rigged, and “did actually affect the outcome.”

Lake would go on break the news on her Twitter account, along with retweeting the news from others who posted about the breaking update:

Original Story:

After narrowly losing her election to Democrat incumbent Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, Trump-backed Republican candidate Kari Lake is suing Maricopa County over how her November 8th election was handled. Lake would lose the initial election by 17,117 votes statewide, out of a total of over 2.6 million votes counted, which falls barely outside the automatic recount margin of 0.5 percent. In total, Lake lost by a margin of 50.3%-49.7%. In total, Lake would call short of the Arizona recount threshold by a total of 0.67 percent. Any small rounding error or voting day error may have been enough to not only swing the count back into the margin of a recount, but it may have even been enough to put Lake on top.

In her lawsuit, Lake is alleging that GOP voters were “disenfranchised” after encountering issues at several polling precincts on Election Day, including issues casting ballots, wait times, and voting machine malfunctions. Lake is also alleging that there were “tens of thousands” of mismatching signatures on ballots that were sent through mail-in ballots.

Lake would call for a full forensic audit of the printer-tabulator problems that were found in November, an inspection of ballots and voter registration records, including signatures, disqualification of illegal votes, and redoing the election as well as other relief.

Following filing her lawsuit Lake took to Twitter saying:

Lake would go on to add:

View the full lawsuit here:

Rachel Alexander of the Arizona Sun Times also reported on Lake’s claim surrounding the vast amount of mail in ballot and inability to match signatures, saying that there were “90% of mismatched signatures just ACCEPTED”, adding that this story is “far worse than anything I’ve reported to date.”

Rachel Alexander’s article in the Arizona Sun Times goes on to say:

The complaint alleged that the number of illegal votes cast in the election “far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin” between the two candidates, a difference of .67 percent. It said Democrat Katie Hobbs did not receive the highest number of votes due to illegal votes.

The lawsuit alleged that between 15,603 and 29,257 Republicans were disenfranchised who would have voted for Lake, according to a calculation performed by data analyst Richard Baris of Big Data Poll who surveyed voters about whether they experienced problems on Election Day. Due to the extremely high numbers of Republicans voting in person on election day, those votes were expected to fall 70 percent to Lake, 30 percent to Hobbs.

The complaint stated that “hundreds of thousands” of mail-in ballots lacked a chain of custody. It said over 298,942 ballots delivered to third-party signature verification service Runbeck on Election Day lacked a chain of custody, a class 2 misdemeanor. A Runbeck employee and other observers provided affidavits regarding witnessing this. The Runbeck employee also stated there were at least 9,530 duplicate ballots printed and issued with no chain of custody. Two days after the election, 25,000 more ballots were found which lacked a chain of custody.

The lawsuit cited an investigation into the 2020 election conducted by We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), which found many incidents where Arizonans discovered they had been registered to vote or their voter registration had been changed, unbeknownst to them. WPAA reviewed 12.12 percent of the signatures on ballot envelopes in the Maricopa County 2020 election and found that 18,022 were clearly mismatches, and 19,631 failed the Arizona Secretary of State’s standards. This translated to 156,000 likely mismatches countywide and 165,600 failing the standards, yet the county only rejected 587 ballots for mismatched signatures. WPAA discovered that thousands of those same voters voted again in the 2022 election.