In the latest appeal, Lake and his lawyers further strengthened their claims of election fraud.Instead of claiming that Maricopa County incompetently ran its elections or that there are unnamed bad actors within the system. injected illegal ballotsLake took the argument a step further, blaming the county as a whole for engineering and planning as described by the attorneys. 2022 Election Day “Chaos”.

In his appeal last week, Lake said Maricopa Superior Court at the end of the May trial that Maricopa County conducted signature verification on all mail-in and early ballots that Lake's team asked the court to consider. He dissented from Judge Peter Thompson's decision.

Between 3 day trialLake and her lawyers argued that signatures on 275,000 ballot envelopes intended to verify voters' identities were reviewed and approved faster than human ability, in less than three seconds. .

Maricopa County election officials testified that matching signatures sometimes takes just a second, and that Thompson ultimately agreed.

But Brehm argued in his appeal that election officials did not follow signature comparison procedures outlined in the law. Election procedure manualit has the force of law.

“Maricopa created a facade of transparency and science to mislead the public about the integrity and scientific rigor of the signature verification process,” Brehm wrote.

He went on to say that the appeals court secured thousands of votes for both candidates in proportion to the number of signatures that Lake claimed were not verified, overturned the election results in Lake's favor, and nominated Lake as governor. I concluded that I should do one or the other. Hold new elections. He claimed that securing at least 164,093 votes would be enough to hand Lake victory.

But Lake and his lawyers not only challenged Thompson's decision in the latest trial in May, but also revisited some of the earlier arguments Thompson had dismissed. Her attempts to pursue these claims were also rejected by the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, essentially meaning they are no longer part of the case.

In his latest appellate complaint, Brehm said that in the original December 2022 trial, Thompson accused Republicans of voting on Election Day because of issues with tabulation machines that rejected thousands of ballots. It wrongly dismissed Lake's claims that he was disenfranchised and caused long lines and frustration for voters, he wrote.

In Maricopa County, where Republicans outnumbered Democrats in person on Election Day by nearly 4 to 1, Brehm claimed he was illegally disenfranchised due to problems with the tabulation machines.

The county has repeatedly assured voters that all legal votes cast on Election Day will ultimately be counted, even if tallies at polling places reject them. Lake's team has not produced any evidence to refute his claims.

His team also found that the county did not conduct required logic and accuracy tests on the tally machine, that county officials lied about the tests in court, and that the machine did not use the tally function. He writes based on what he called “new evidence” about what he knew in advance. Work properly on election day. The new evidence includes tabulator logs that showed 260 of the tabulators rejected votes during logic and accuracy tests last October.

The county said in an earlier court filing that Lake's team had misread records, and that all of the misread ballots were due to major equipment malfunctions, and in some cases the ballots were slightly askew. He said that some of the cases were due to paper jams.

Lake and her attorney also said that “malware or remote administrative changes could be causing the misconfiguration of the ballots that fit into thousands of pages,” which contributed to the problems with the aggregation tools. He continued to insist that he was. Lake said an independent investigation into Maricopa County's Election Day issues, led by former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, has investigated why four printers printed randomly using the “fit to page” setting. They could not identify it and claimed that it was proven to be malware or intentionally changed settings. caused a problem.

They argue that the combination of an alleged lack of signature verification and problems with in-person voting on Election Day have particularly targeted Republican voters and disenfranchised them at far higher rates than Democratic voters. ing.

But Lake's lawyers acknowledged there was no substantive evidence of wrongdoing by Maricopa County and repeatedly used the word “assuming” in their filings that Maricopa County was “inferring” because of undue influence on Republican voters. He claimed that it can be inferred that he orchestrated chaos on Election Day.

“Although the record may not prove whether Maricopa's intentional acts simply resulted in the election day chaos or whether Maricopa actively planned that disruption, the most likely inference is The latter,” Brem wrote.

Defendants in the case, including Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, have until Oct. 26 to respond to the appeal.