Kari Lake at a campaign event in Scottsdale on October 19, 2022.Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror

Kari Lake Wednesday called multiple witnesses in her second election challenge trial, whose testimony substantiated her allegation that Maricopa County did not verify signatures for early voting in the November 2022 election. It seems to be a direct loss.

Kurt Olsen, one of Lake’s attorneys, told the court on Wednesday, the first day of the trial, that “the evidence we have here today will show that the process failed and that there was no actual signature verification.”

A Trump-backing Republican, Lake lost the gubernatorial race to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes, but in the six months since, the election has been rigged and he is the real governor. I have argued that there is.

this is second trial In the courtroom of Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson in a Lake lawsuit aimed at overturning the results of the gubernatorial race. Lake lost the case in the first trial in December.After an appeal, the Arizona Supreme Court sent the signature confirmation request back to the court of first instance for further inspection. Lake included her 10 claims in the original application.

Before the trial, which began Wednesday, Thompson informed Lake that he would have to prove Maricopa County’s claims to be correct in order to win the case. No signature verification efforts were made. A signature verifier compares the signature on the ballot envelope to the signature on file for that voter. If the signature is rejected by the first reviewer, the signature is sent to a more experienced worker for deeper examination.

Two of Lake’s witnesses on the first day of trial served as early judges, known as Level 1 judges, during the November 2022 election.

Maricopa County Deputy Attorney Jack O’Connor thanked them for their work and emphasized that they actually did the signature verification.

“I was very focused on verifying the signatures and making sure they matched,” Jacqueline Onigkate told O’Connor.

Onigkate told Olsen that during the signature review process, the more experienced Level 2 reviewers were overloaded, and some of the signatures they had already rejected were sent to her and the rest of the workers for further review. He said he was worried that he would be sent back to Many of the signatures were bad.

She also testified that she was reminded to be careful to see if the person in charge was confident in her decision to verify or reject the signature.

“We are being monitored and have been advised several times that audits are being conducted on all of us,” Onigkate said.

Another reviewer, Andrew Myers, said that when it took the team just 36 hours to verify the 298,000 early voting signatures that arrived on Election Day, from his perspective it was a “calculation. We didn’t get along,” he repeatedly told the court. But Mr. Myers seemed unaware that far more people were working on signature verification than those he had worked with directly.

Both Onigkate and Myers testified that there were 24 to 40 Level 1 signature judges working to verify signatures in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 general election, and only 3 Level 2 judges. .

However, Maricopa County Co-Election Commissioner Ray Valenzuela later testified that the numbers provided by these witnesses were wildly off. Valenzuela said a total of 155 people were working on the signature verification during that time, including 24 temporary employees like Onigkate and Myers and full-time county employees.

However, not all of them worked at the Maricopa County Counting and Election Center, where contingents interacted with them. Some worked for the county registrar’s office in downtown Phoenix and Tempe.

Lake’s team showed the court a video taken from a signature judge’s livestream in November 2022, in which one man quickly clicked on the screen without scrolling down to compare the signatures and the voters’ signatures. said it approves all signatures without checking with is on the file.

“It’s taken out of context,” Valenzuela said of the video.

He explained that each signature reviewer worked on a batch of 250 signatures and when they reached the end of that batch, they had to go back and review their work. Valenzuela said that may be what the man in the video was doing.

The trial adjourned for the day at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and was scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. Thursday with Lake’s expert signature verification witness present. Erich Spekin set to testify.

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