by Mark Schwendau

Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for Governor of Arizona, had her legal team offer closing arguments in the Maricopa County Superior Courthouse Friday after a three-day trial. Attorneys for the state argued Lake brought no evidence to prove the 2022 gubernatorial election was stolen from her.

But Lake saw it very differently, as did much of the country. “We’ve shown and proven in court what the world knows,” Lake said as the trial concluded Friday afternoon. “That we have very, very bad elections here in Maricopa County.

I’m praying that the judge feels the weight of this republic on his shoulders.”

After a trip to the Arizona Supreme Court and back, where six of her seven claims against Governor Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, and Maricopa County were dismissed, Lake argued once again to Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson that the county didn’t conduct signature verification on the more than 1.3 million mail-in ballots cast in the General Election.

After the October 11th testing and certification process, she also brought new evidence that Hobbs people secretly tested the 446 vote tabulators again on October 14th, 17th, and 18th, when they knew 260 of those tabulators would fail on Election Day. The presumption is then that those machines known to fail were sent to heavily Republican voting districts of Maricopa County.

Two whistleblowers who worked for the county in signature verification during the election testified that they didn’t see how workers could have verified as many signatures as they did in the timeframe given, insinuating that workers didn’t do their jobs.

But it was more than insinuation. As Lake tweeted out after the second day of the trial Thursday,

“Our expert witness just testified thousands of signatures were approved at a rate of 99.87% in under two seconds in Maricopa County.

This is not humanly possible.

It’s also not signature verification.

This is rubber stamping wrong ballots to alter the outcome of our election.”

Lake’s attorneys pointed to a document summarizing the county’s signature verification data, which showed roughly 70,000 signatures were verified in less than two seconds, which Lake’s team said would have been humanly impossible.

“That’s not signature verification,” Lake’s attorney Kurt Olsen said. “If I flip through the pages of a book,” he went on, quickly thumbing through documents to mimic verifiers looking at signatures, “I can say I’m reading, but that’s not so.”

Kari Lake also tweeted: “Maricopa County ‘verified’ roughly 70,000 signatures in two seconds and approved 264,000 ballots in less than three seconds.

These are numbers from their system logs. That is not humanly possible.

And it’s not signature verification.

Not even close.”

Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter A. Thompson dismissed eight of Lake’s ten claims last year in her lawsuit. While public records show this judge to be nonpartisan, Lake has been critical of him for his previous rulings, and he leaves many scratching their heads when he gets done. The Arizona Supreme Court later overruled this trial judge, and the entire matter was returned to him. The court rejected six of seven Lake claims but remanded the remaining claim, regarding signature verification in Maricopa County, back to the trial court for reconsideration.

For reasons unknown, Judge Thompson dismissed the tabulator-malfunction intentionality portion of her challenge but did take up the signature match verification portion of her litigation.

Lake and her team stood by their claim the county didn’t verify signatures on mail-in ballots, setting aside the “gatekeeper defense from fraud in mail-in voting,” as her attorney Kurt Olsen put it.

“Maricopa puts on a façade of taking signature verification seriously,” he said in his closing statement.

“There’s a reason we’re the laughing stock of elections,” Lake said after the trial. “There’s a reason Arizonans don’t trust in our electoral system here.”

Lake’s attorneys asked Judge Thompson to order a new election.

Attorneys expect Judge Thompson to rule next week.

OPINION:

The socialists of the mainstream news media are either not reporting this story or slanting the story such that Lake lost and Hobbs won, and Lake should learn to accept defeat. The truth is that Lake has likely proven she is the Governor of Arizona, and Hobbs, as Secretary of State, committed a crime with the help of numerous others. She has possibly proven it with a bogus signature verification ruse and voting tabulators that were intentionally sabotaged just days after they were certified as ready for the election.

Any curious judge would have been most interested in finding new evidence of the tabulation machines being altered since last seeing Lake’s legal team. A real judge would have been outraged for being played. Not this judge, though. Why?

Copyright © 2023 by Mark S. Schwendau

Mark S. Schwendau is a retired technology professor who has always had a sideline in news-editorial writing where his byline has been, “Bringing little known news to people who simply want to know the truth.”  He classifies himself as a Christian conservative who God cast to be a realist.  His website is www.IDrawIWrite.Tech.