Fixing Election Law

Powerful clip from Kari Lake's attorney Kurt Olsen:

“Maricopa’s log file data shows that 11 of these signature verification workers approved 170K signatures at a rate of between 0 and 2.99 seconds with a 99.97% approval rating. That’s not signature review, your Honor.” pic.twitter.com/meOy5Ys9uZ

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 17, 2023

The quote is over 274,000 signatures were approved in under 3 seconds and then 11 did most of them. So the only thing Lake has been allowed to argue in court is that Maricopa has not followed it’s own signature verification processes. Further, Lake must show that the failure to follow procedure, produced significant numbers to prove with clear and convincing evidence that the election was changed in Hobbs favor.

Lake has narrowed her claim to that complained of in Reyes, and she must demonstrate at trial pursuant to her concessions that Maricopa County’s higher level signature reviewers conducted no signature verification or curing and in so doing had systematically failed to materially comply with the law. This is, of course, in addition to the requirement that she prove that this alleged complete failure to conduct signature verification resulted in a change in the outcome of the gubernatorial election  proven by “competent mathematical basis.” All of this must be done by clear and convincing evidence.  Lake , 525 P.3d at 668, ¶ 10.

These are the judges pretrial words, not only must Lake prove that signature verification was circumvented sufficiently to question the election but that NO SIGNATURE VERIFICATION OR CURING was done- and systematically they need to show that the county failed to comply with the law. That is entirely different than sufficient circumvention of law to change an election. The judge also held her to arguing only the higher level reviewers created this problem. The high level reviewers only see rejected ballots from the first level. This statement significantly reduces the number of ballots in question statistically limiting Lake’s ability to prove an outcome was changed. The addition of ‘curing’ in the statement, is even worse and is an obfuscation of the understanding that the ballots are secret and ANY curing was completed behind the scenes, away from observers, on unknowable numbers of ballots. How do you prove that NO curing was done on a specific accepted signature? Again, you have no access to the data showing what was done.

Well, the Lake attorney’s are going with the time to review ballots based on the fact that hundreds of thousands of signatures were reviewed so quickly that they were simply accepted. This seems very clearly the case at this point based on the following. One reviewer accepted just under 30,000 signatures without any rejections and others accepted over 274,000 on an under 3 second review. The review screens weren’t even being scrolled down to show the reference signature to the reviewer, meaning they weren’t checked at all.

Is anyone surprised by that?

Of the 170,000 signatures reviewed above, 99.97% were approved meaning there were approximately 51 signatures rejected for a city sized block of people. Observers and counters gave affidavits saying they had seen percentages close to 30% rejection in some areas, meaning that in a sane court the lawyers have proven the first requirement that the county systematically and materially failed to comply with signature verification.

Now, according to Judge Thompson, they must prove that these signatures changed the outcome of the election. Again, Lake can’t see the ballots associated with the signatures and has been given no actual access to the signatures. How would she show that these signatures are actually bad? Perhaps it was a city sized block of really well done signatures. Per the supreme court, Lake may use statistics to show the change in the election result but how can she ‘prove’ such a thing without access to the signatures themselves?

It looks to me like judge has set up a nice vacation for himself after he’s done creating precedent to prevent any legal challenges to future elections, while thrashing about like an angry toddler all over Arizona election law.