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Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, is celebrating after the assistant secretary of state has said she will not certify the results of the election until she gets the answers she wants.
Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright has said she will not certify the election between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs until she gets answers to the questions she said surround the voting in Maricopa County.
“These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law,” the assistant attorney general said in a letter to a top elections official, The Daily Mail reported.
“Arizonans deserve a full report and accounting of the myriad problems that occurred in relation to Maricopa County’s administration of the 2022 General Election,” she said in the letter to Thomas Liddy, civil division chief at the Maricopa County’s Attorney’s Office.
“As the canvass is looming, and these issues relate to Maricopa County’s ability to lawfully certify election results – the Unit requests a response to the aforementioned issues on or before Maricopa County submits its official canvass to the Secretary of State, which must occur on or before November 28, 2022,” she said.
The Washington Post reported.
Starting early on Election Day, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be read by vote-counting machines, county officials have said. That forced voters to wait in line, travel to another location or deposit their ballots in secure boxes that were transferred to downtown Phoenix and counted there.
County leaders have yet to explain what caused the problems, saying they will undertake a comprehensive review once ballot tabulation is complete. But they maintain that no one was denied the right to vote. An Arizona judge came to the same conclusion in denying a request from Republicans to extend voting hours on Election Day in light of the
But the Election Day issues, now highlighted by the state’s top law enforcement official, are likely to fuel Republican efforts to dispute the outcome of the election, especially the razor-thin margin in the race for attorney general, according to top lawyers associated with both parties, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments of an ongoing legal matter. Democrats say they believe the claims will lack merit.
“Based on sworn complaints submitted by election workers employed by Maricopa County, the BOD printers were tested on Monday, November 7 without any apparent problems,” the assistant attorney general said.
“Based on sworn complaints received by the unit, not only have poll workers reported that they were not trained and/or not provided with information on how to execute ‘check out’ procedures, but many voters have reported the second voting location required the voter to cast a provisional ballot as the e-Pollbooks maintained the voter had cast a ballot in the original voting location,” she said.
“In fact, Arizona law specifically prohibits provisional ballots to be counted when a voter has signed multiple pollbooks,” she said.
Lake responded to the letter by insisting to The Daily Mail that she will become the governor even after the contest was called for Hobbs.
“The way they run elections in Maricopa County is worse than in banana republics around this world,” she said.
“And I’ll tell you what, I believe at the end of the day that this will be turned around and I don’t know what the solution will be but I still believe I will become governor, and we are going to restore honesty to our elections,” she said.
Wright said that “at least 60 locations had problems because of ballot-on-demand printers that had printer configuration settings that were ‘non-uniform,’ meaning they could not be read by tabulating machines,” The Daily Mail reported.
In a video, Lake declared that she is still in the contest and that she has hired attorneys to make her case.
“I am still in this fight with you. For two years, I’ve been sounding the alarm about our broken election system here in Arizona – and this past week has confirmed everything we’ve been saying. Well, we called for Katie Hobbs to recuse herself over a year ago. They ridiculed us. It turns out we were right. The fox was guarding the hen house, and because of that, voters have been disenfranchised when we raise concerns,” she said.
“Rest assured, I have assembled the best and brightest legal team and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week,” she said. “I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs. My resolve to fight for you is higher than ever.”
