Lake tweeted Friday, “Maricopa County Election Officials REFUSE To Allow @KariLake Legal Team To Inspect Ballot Signatures What are they hiding?”
She added in another tweet, “Maricopa County has confirmed what we all knew to be true: Ballot signatures DO NOT MATCH. Election Officials brazenly HIDING EVIDENCE from us. This is the smoking gun.”
“Unfortunately for them, I’m not giving up — even if that means legally forcing them to hand over evidence,” Lake wrote.
Last week, the Arizona Supreme Court directed the trial court in Lake’s challenge of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ November victory to review the Republican’s claim that signature verification laws for mail-in ballots were not followed by the county in the election.
Lake’s legal filing to the Supreme Court said that “whistleblowers conducting signature verification at [the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center] came forward with the evidence that Maricopa disregarded Arizona law and allowed tens of thousands of uncured ballots with nonmatching signatures to be counted.”
Her attorney, Kurt Olsen, said following the Supreme Court decision in his client’s favor on the issue, “There are literally over 100,000 ballots in question because of invalid signatures that were accepted and tabulated.”
“This is not a challenge about simply a few bad signatures. … This is about a systemic failure of the entire signature verification process, which is allowing tens of thousands of ballots with signatures that don’t match the record on file. And this is the only security feature for mail-in voting,” Olsen said.
Lake’s original legal complaint filed in December to the trial court includes affidavits from three whistleblowers who work for Maricopa County saying 90 percent of ballots flagged for signature mismatches did not go through the curing process to verify the identity of the voters.
“I believe that when the people of Arizona, and frankly the people of this country, see how poorly matched or mismatched or no match on these mail-in ballots, they are going to want to re-examine whether we have mail-in ballots in the first place,” Lake said on...