The legal battle over the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election reached another milestone on Monday as Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Thompson ruled against Republican Kari Lake’s election challenge.
Lake had lost the election to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and she argued that irregularities in ballot counting and verification had affected the outcome.
Judge Thompson, however, found Lake’s allegations unsubstantiated.
“The Court DOES NOT find clear and convincing evidence or a preponderance of evidence that such misconduct did in fact affect the result of the 2022 General Election by a competent mathematical basis,” he said.
The court’s ruling reaffirmed that Hobbs, who led Lake by around 17,000 votes in the 2022 election, was indeed the elected governor.
Lake’s legal counsel, Kurt Olsen, contended that the speed at which approximately 274,000 ballot signatures were verified—less than three seconds per signature—was questionable.
Nevertheless, the judge dismissed these concerns, pointing out that Arizona law does not stipulate any specific timeframe for signature reviews.
The initial dismissal of Lake’s lawsuit by Judge Thompson was briefly interrupted by an Arizona Supreme Court decision that required a reexamination of her claims related to the signature review process.
Lake and her legal team focused on irregularities in signature verification during the recount, aiming to prove that these inconsistencies contravened Arizona Revised Statutes § 16-550(A) and the Election Procedures Manual (EPM).
Olsen cited instances where 11 signature verification workers processed around 170,000 signatures in less than three seconds each, with a high approval rating of 99.97%.
Olsen argued that at least 70,000 mail-in ballots were not appropriately verified, thus necessitating the overturning of the election results.
Witness Jacqueline Onigkeit, a signature reviewer from Maricopa County, testified that she observed numerous inconsistencies in the signatures on ballot affidavits.
She stated that a considerable number of signatures didn’t match the names of the voters, causing discomfort among many reviewers.
Onigkeit also mentioned that the overwhelming number of rejections led supervisors to redirect ballots back to level one reviewers.
In a stunning revelation, Lake’s legal team presented evidence of a reviewer swiftly approving signatures within a span of two seconds per signature.
Despite these allegations, the judge maintained that Onigkeit’s testimony demonstrated that “level one and level two signature review did take place in some fashion.”
The court ultimately ruled in favor of the validity of the signature review process.
In the face of the court’s dismissal, Kari Lake is expected to take her case to the Arizona Supreme Court once again, The Gateway Pundit is reporting, refusing to concede defeat in her election challenge.
