Day 2 of Kari Lake’s trial is a bust

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Day 2 of Kari Lake’s trial is a bust

May 19, 2023

Thursday was Kari Lake’s big announcement. It was the long-awaited moment when she pulled out her flare to show America that Maricopa County had stolen her election and denied her the governorship of Arizona.

In the end, she couldn’t even find a lukewarm popgun.

After six months, two trials, and countless Twitter rants, Mr. Lake told a judge that the county had gone too far into scrutinizing early voting signatures. asking you to discard it.

Weirdly, it was only six months ago that she was blaming the county for being too slow to finish counting and announcing the winners. But I did.

Lake’s (most recent) lawsuit centers around her expert witnesses, who pay $600 an hour. A self-proclaimed forensic documents analyst, she also made a cameo appearance in the ill-fated cyber ninja audit of the 2020 election.

Erich Spekin testified Thursday that county officials reviewed the signatures of 321,495 voters each within three seconds.

“I don’t believe it can be done,” he told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, citing a study of computer keystrokes by Level 1 signing judges. “It shouldn’t be.”

The fact that Mr. Speckin believes this is unlikely is unlikely to persuade Mr. Thompson to overturn the election six months ago.

But I doubt Lake really expects to win the court challenge. This means keeping her base excited and ready, and her donations pouring in, as she prepares to run for the three-way race for the U.S. Senate next year. .

That is, unless Donald Trump makes the former TV anchor his number two.

Earlier this week, Thompson laid out What Lake needs to do to win the case, based on legal challenges filed by Lake’s attorneys. Simply put, it must show that the 1.3 million early ballots cast in the November election “has not been verified.”

That’s probably an insurmountably high order.

Especially considering that even Lake County’s own “whistleblower” testified on Wednesday about how much time they and other county officials spent verifying signatures.

Maricopa County Elections Commissioner Ray Valenzuela, a longtime campaign official who reviewed 1,600 signatures in November, took Thompson for a walk in the weeds and said a two- to three-second review shouldn’t worry him. I explained the circumstances and reasons why there was no

Valenzuela said Level 1 judges would compare early ballot signatures with the most recent signatures in the voter’s file and, if they match, send them straight to Level 3 review, where a portion of the signatures would be audited. said.

If found to be inconsistent, it will be sent to Level 2 for inspection by more trained and more accessible judges to compare additional signatures on the voter’s record.

Mr. Lake’s lawyers hope to convince Mr. Thompson that these two- and three-second signature checks are the mathematical basis for overturning an election that he lost by 17,117 votes.

But they never provided the actual math to prove their claims.

Unsurprisingly, Lake announced on Twitter that there was a funny thing going on with so many signatures being approved so quickly.

“This is impossible for humans,” she said tweeted. “It’s not signature verification either. This is rubber stamping a bad ballot to change the outcome of an election.”

Never mind that the court has already dismissed her claim that tens of thousands of fake ballots were injected into the tally, presumably to rubber stamp. (I think sanctions had something to do with it, too.)

Alternatively, early ballots were sent to authenticated voters, and there is no evidence that thousands of votes were hijacked by fraudsters seeking to deny Mr. Lake the victory.

Never mind if even Lake’s own expert couldn’t point out a single ballot that shouldn’t have been counted.