Arizona Republican governor candidate Kari Lake has filed a petition to transfer the appeal of her election dispute case to the state Supreme Court.
Lake’s investigative team "discovered that over 298,942 ballots delivered to third-party signature verification service Runbeck Election Services on Election Day had no chain of custody, and provided this evidence" to Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson, who dismissed the case, former Maricopa County official Rachel Alexander noted in a Jan. 2 Townhall.com op-ed.
"A Runbeck employee stated there were at least 9,530 duplicate ballots printed and issued with no chain of custody. And two days after the election, 25,000 more ballots were found which lacked a chain of custody, totaling over 333,472 ballots. Under Arizona law, every one of those constitutes a class 2 misdemeanor," added Alexander, who previously served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arizona, and Special Assistant/Deputy County Attorney for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
Democrat Katie Hobbs was declared the winner over Lake by about 17,000 votes.
But Alexander contends that, outside of the leftist bubble attempting to control the narrative, nobody in Arizona actually believes Hobbs won.
"The Law of Large Numbers contradicts the odds of so many 'coincidences' happening in the election to favor Hobbs and the other Democrats who strangely swept Arizona’s top races," Alexander wrote. "The coincidences should reasonably balance out to half favor Hobbs, half favor Lake, but they don’t, they are all in favor of Hobbs."
The Republican Party has a 4% voter registration advantage over Democrats in both Maricopa County and statewide.
"Despite this, 14% of voters supposedly flipped to oppose Arizona’s top Trump candidates," Alexander noted. "Just like how no one believed Donald Trump lost the state in 2020 when he led Joe Biden three or four points going into the election, no one believes Hobbs won. This is why instead of being happy and gloating at their win, the Left is reacting with a bizarre level of intense anger towards the right."
In his opinion, judge Thompson said it was unprecedented to set aside an election like the Lake-Hobbs contest.
But, as Alexander previously pointed out, it has "happened many times."
• In 2013, in Pembroke, North Carolina, a new election was ordered for town council after it came out that at least two candidates helped bring people to the town's early voting location who were ineligible to vote.
• In 2018, in Sharpsburg, North Carolina, a judge merely cited “an irregularity” as enough to order a new election. There, only 20 to 25 voters were alleged to have been disenfranchised.
• In 2019, a judge ordered a new election for a Georgia House seat based on merely finding that four voters were ineligible.
• Also in 2019, in North Carolina, Democrats were all too happy to praise a judge ordering a new election where a contractor was accused of illegally collecting hundreds of ballots for the winning Republican candidate. He wasn’t even convicted yet, merely accused.
• In 2020, after hundreds of mail-in ballots were discovered in a mailbox in Paterson, New Jersey, a judge ordered a new election in the city council race that was affected.
• In 2022, in Surry County, North Carolina, a judge ordered a new election in the commissioners’ race over the mere action of a poll worker informing voters that one of the candidates was deceased.
"The courts in these cases did not set high bars for proof unlike Thompson," Alexander noted.
Legal expert Robert Barnes pointed out that Thompson required a standard of “intentionality” that wasn’t even required. “Arizona law is clear: even inadvertent errors in election require setting aside result if it casts outcome in doubt,” he tweeted. “Intentionality is NOT required when the error casts actual winner ‘in doubt.’ ”
Another legal expert, Robert Bowes, observed that Thompson relied upon an old case to require a high bar of clear and convincing evidence. The 1959 case, Buzard v. Griffin, that Thompson cited is no longer the standard; Miller v. Pacacho overruled it in 1994. There, the court stated, “We, therefore, hold that a showing of fraud is not a necessary condition to invalidate absentee balloting. It is sufficient that an express non-technical statute was violated, and ballots cast in violation of the statute affected the election.”
Instead, Alexander noted, "Thompson just blew off all the violations, including the more serious class 2 misdemeanor crimes."
"All eyes are now on the Arizona Supreme Court and then SCOTUS to see if they go along with the trial court judge and cover for the wrongdoing using a bogus technical excuse," Alexander added.
New: @KariLake has filed a petition to transfer the appeal to the AZ Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/f7aCmhTug0
— Tracy Beanz (@tracybeanz) January 1, 2023
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