A Maricopa County judge may allow Kari Lake to prove one of her most bombastic claims in a lawsuit over her loss to Governor Katie Hobbs in November. The county did not follow state law when approving the envelope.
Lake’s argument, which the Arizona Supreme Court remanded to the first instance last week, is the last chance for the defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate to prove that her election should be overturned. of money making media tour based on false claim that she is real won the election. But this her claim, so far only supported by her anecdote, faces many substantial hurdles in convincing a judge that she has her evidence. .
Much of her theory is based on how Maricopa County verified voter signatures in 2020, not 2022, and external analysis conducted as part of Republican senator reviews of the 2020 election. “Maricopa County election officials have allowed ballots with such signature discrepancies to count into her 2020,” she wrote in her initial complaint, adding a comparison of signatures from 2020. showed. in the 2022 general election. “
As in 2020 and beyond, Maricopa County Recorder Steven Richer, who knew this process would be heavily scrutinized, was also a Republican, and in the years leading up to the midterm elections in previously unreported ways. He tried to improve the process. According to a Votebeat review of county documents and data, he increased the training of workers reviewing signatures, increased the signatures workers had to compare, and implemented an audit step for approved signatures. and increased the number of people doing the work.
“We added more controls and checks because this is a human process,” says Richer.
These changes may have caused the county to deny a significant number of ballots in 2022 due to incorrect or missing signatures. The county rejected her 3,099 votes, or .24%, in 2022 for incorrect or missing signatures, compared to .11% and .18% in 2020. % in 2018, according to county data. The number of bad signatures rejected more than doubled from 587 to 1800.
Supreme Court ruling said Lake must first prove Maricopa County failed to follow state law on signature review. Laws requiring counties to review signatures It doesn’t elaborate on how exactly the signature should be verified, other than to say that the worker should compare the signature to other signatures on file.
Second, Lake would have to prove that mistakes in this process led to so many fraudulent signatures, changing the outcome of an election that Hobbes won by more than 17,000 votes. prize. To prove it in court, Lake must find tens of thousands of potentially fraudulent signatures, according to a formula set in court.
Richer said he is confident Lake’s claims, along with more than 20 other lawsuits relating to the 2020 and 2022 elections, will be dismissed.
“This case is no exception and just adds another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak,” Richer said in the Supreme Court’s post-ruling statement.
The case could reveal how Richer has been trying to improve its signature review process since 2020.
Attempts to improve signature reviewer training
The ability of temporary election officials to accurately verify the signatures of hundreds of thousands of voters widely controversialOutside of the electoral world, verifying signatures in criminal cases and the like is usually left to extensively trained forensic professionals who can spend hours on just one signature. .
This is the reason Maricopa County uses other bucks to prevent vote-by-mail fraud, including barcodes on ballot envelopes that ensure that each voter receives only one vote and the county receives only one vote from each voter. That’s part of the reason there’s a top.
Still, states use signatures as a way to verify voter identities. This is because mail voters are not present at the polling place to present the required identification to those voting at the polling place.
Arizona law does not require specific training for workers performing the work.
According to the statute and election procedures manual, county officials say a voter’s signature must be compared to other signatures on file, such as when the voter registers or signs the ballot envelope. . It doesn’t go into further detail about the method the worker should use to ensure the signature is valid.
To improve training, Richer this year required all administrators to attend a four-hour state-sponsored training led by the Associated Forensic Laboratory, a private company specializing in forensic training. Prior to this, the manager didn’t have to go if he had been there once, Richer said. Other workers are also being trained, election officials said.
According to Secretary of State spokesperson Paul Smith-Leonard, training is offered to all 15 counties, explaining the characteristics of valid and forged signatures and how signatures change with age, or Instruct workers about whether or not they will change.
Richer also said this year that his team Comprehensive guide How to review signatures created by the state in July 2020.
Removed computerized sorting of voter signatures
Since 2020, the technology the county has been using to organize potentially blank signatures has been criticized, with Trump supporters claiming the county uses artificial intelligence to verify signatures. . This was an error as all signatures were eventually verified by humans.
The technology, called Verus Pro, is provided by Runbeck Election Services, which processes mail-in ballots for counties. Richer has decided to turn off his Verus Pro for the 2022 election.
“We got rid of it because of all the fuss that was made about it and not wanting to muddy the water,” said Richer.
More signatures and additional audit steps
Maricopa County has always employed a multi-layered process for approving signatures. Richer added details and instructions.
The first reviewer has three signatures on file instead of one to compare with the voter signatures on the envelope. This is to “provide a high level of confidence in the initial conclusion,” Richer said.
If that first reviewer believes the signature does not match what is on file, it is sent to an administrator who has access to all voter signatures on file. If the manager denies it, that’s when the county tries to reach out to the voter and make sure it’s a ballot.
Under state law, counties must attempt to contact a voter before dismissing a voter’s fraudulent or blank signature, and voters must verify their signatures within five days of the election.
Richer also added one more step to the review process. He calls this the “audit queue”. Once a first-level reviewer accepts a signature, it becomes completely unacceptable. It enters a queue, and for every 10,000 approved signatures, a randomized sample of his 2% of them is selected for additional review.
Hire more staff and reduce speed pressure
To ease the pressure on workers, Richer hired more temporary staff to work full-time and encouraged full-time staff to help out as often as possible.
The county has 29 temporary staff and 4 full-time staff in 2020, compared to 41 temporary staff in 2022, despite a significantly higher voter turnout in 2020. was Richer said he verified thousands of signatures himself in November.
Richer also tried not to pressure workers to act quickly, he said.
“The message from my office has been consistently, do what you need to do to feel comfortable,” he said. will not be paid according to
Overall, workers marked 18,510 signatures as “not matching,” of which 15,411 voters either confirmed it was their ballot or “corrected” their ballot. As a result, 3,099 were rejected for improper or missing signatures. Of those, 1,299 were unsigned and 1,800 were unsigned.
Richer said all his changes were made to help workers “be more thorough rather than just pushing the ballot forward.”
But he reiterated that signature verification is only the last step, not the only step, in verifying a voter’s identity. He said he had no evidence for allegations that the ballots were stolen in the mail, or that a significant number of ballots had been stolen in the mail.
