‘Krazy Kari’ Lake’s Election Challenge Is Not Going Well – Who Coulda Guessed?

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This is never a good sign. Judge scolds Kari Lake’s lawyers as first day of trial is marred with technical glitches:

Judge Peter Thompson admonished attorneys for former candidate Kari Lake (R) on Wednesday for failing to prepare for trial properly.

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On the first day of Lake’s election challenge trial, Judge Peter Thompson said that attorneys for Lake had botched the number system for exhibits.

Thompson explained that the court’s clerk was forced to work until 11 p.m. to create a new numbering system for the evidence.

“Because the exhibits were not correctly identified by the plaintiffs, my clerk worked on this until 11 o’clock last night,” the judge said.

Lake attorney Bryan Blehm was later forced to tell the judge that the plaintiffs had technical problems presenting their evidence.

He couldn’t get the court’s video projector to work with his computer. Doesn’t he have computer “experts” he is calling as witnesses to give him a hand?

Viewers at home can watch the hearing on a court livestream, which can be accessed at https://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/calendar/today/.

Substantively, the Arizona Republic reports, No evidence of misconduct in first day of Kari Lake election-challenge trial:

The first day of an evidence trial based on an election-challenge lawsuit by Republican governor candidate Kari Lake raised plentiful suspicions but did not reveal evidence of the misconduct she alleged.

Lake, a Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump, [falsely] alleges in her suit that malicious acts by election officials caused “vast numbers of illegal votes” to infect the election and that Democrat Katie Hobbs was wrongfully declared the winner.

Election results showed that Hobbs beat Lake by about 17,000 votes in the Nov. 8 election. After basing her campaign on 2020 election conspiracy theories, Lake’s best chance of taking office now rests on convincing a judge she was robbed of a rightful victory.

Roughly seven hours of court proceedings on Wednesday made it clear how difficult that will be.

There’s no question that Maricopa County had some problems on Election Day: Printer malfunctions caused vote-counting machines to reject some ballots at up to one-third of polling locations, causing frustration and long lines but, according to county officials, no disenfranchised voters.

Lake’s two-day trial can only cover a couple of issues related to the problem, though. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson granted Lake the two-day trial based on two specific allegations in her lawsuit, tossing out eight others.

The two that survived allege that an unknown county employee interfered illegally with the printers in a way that caused Lake to lose votes. Lake also alleged that an unknown number of ballots were added to the county’s total by employees of Runbeck Election Services, a Phoenix company that provides election equipment and services for the county, and that receipts of delivery were not maintained in violation of state law.

But Thompson’s ruling said that Lake must prove that the county’s printer malfunctions were intentionally manipulated to affect the election results and that the actions “did actually affect the outcome.”

Lake’s two lawyers, Bryan Blehm and Kurt Olsen, questioned Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Election Director Scott Jarrett and interviewed several witnesses, attempting to create a sense of suspicion about certain county election practices. The county’s chain of custody for ballots received extra attention in the questioning. But at the end of the day, Blehm acknowledged that the evidence of actual wrongdoing didn’t go much beyond “speculation.”

So why are we here? I mean, beyond Lake wanting to undermine public faith in elections and advance Donald Trump’s Big Lie.

Lake sat with her husband in the Mesa courtroom’s visitor benches, which were packed with her entourage of supporters [her posse], news media members and other observers. She watched the all-day proceeding with little emotion, interacting with her phone frequently, and refused to talk to reporters during breaks.

A cyber ‘expert’ was among the witnesses

Some of the most compelling testimony of the day came from IT expert Clay Parikh, who alleged that “someone” had intentionally changed printer presets at polling centers, causing the Election Day malfunctions.

Parikh said he has been with defense firm Northrop Grumman auditing “classified systems” for three years and as a career IT security professional has worked for NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and voting systems. In response to questions by county lawyer Tom Liddy, Parikh also noted that he was being paid $250 an hour from Lake’s defense fund for his testimony and that the fund also paid his airfare and lodging from his home in Alabama. He acknowledged that he had also previously spoken at an event hosted by [Coup Plotter and election denier] Mike Lindell, the “Pillow Guy,” who has helped Trump promote baseless claims of election fraud.

On Tuesday, Parikh inspected dozens of ballots as part of an order by Thompson to the county to make some potential evidence available to Lake’s team. Parikh testified Wednesday that “red tape” securing boxes of the ballots he inspected were not adequate as security measures, and he suspected that ballots were not organized properly, seeming to lend weight to Lake’s theory that the county’s chain of custody was corrupt.

Parikh saw nearly 50 out of 113 “spoiled” ballots that he said had a serious flaw: They consisted of 19-inch ballot images printed on 20-inch ballot paper. The bad print job causes ballots to be rejected by the tabulators, he said, and implied this could have happened to many more ballots. He said the problem must have been intentional because it could have only happened by changing the printer adjustments or changing the setting to the app that creates the ballot style.

Liddy asked him what would happen to a ballot that a tabulator rejected because its ballot image was off-kilter. Parikh said it would be duplicated — the votes from the bad ballot transferred to the duplicate ballot — and run through the tabulator again.

Would it be counted? Liddy asked.

“If they are duplicated correctly and configured correctly, yes,” Parikh said.

Though Parikh said he confirmed some ballots had mismatched ballot images printed on them, Jarrett, the election director, had previously testified that it would be a mistake if any 20-inch ballot had a 19-inch image.

But Parikh had offered no testimony alleging that mismatched-ballot images would not be duplicated and their votes counted, leaving open the idea that the problem had not caused any disenfranchised votes.

More: Kari Lake ‘expert’ witness throws a pouting fit on the stand: ‘I gave the two options, sir’:

A cyber security expert [certified hacker] for Kari Lake became angry on Wednesday when he was forced to admit that ballots printed at the wrong size would eventually be counted.

During the first day of Lake’s election trial, Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy tried to clarify witness Clay Parikh’s concerns about several dozen ballots that he claimed were printed at the wrong size. Parikh said the ballot image was 19 inches while the ballot paper was 20 inches.

Parikh initially agreed that the ballots would be counted after initially being rejected and then duplicated.

But when Liddy repeated the question, the witness became angry.

“Your technical description is not possible!” Parikh said.

“I’m sorry,” Liddy remarked. “I wasn’t attempting to give a technical description. I was just saying what happens, based on your testimony. So you’re saying, in that scenario, that voter who wanted to vote for Kari Lake would never have that vote tabulated? Is that your testimony?”

But Parikh insisted on discussing whether a “shrink to fit setting” could be accidentally configured on a printer.

“That’s not a response,” Liddy complained to Judge Peter Thompson.

“I’m unable to answer your question,” Parikh reluctantly said.

“Let me ask a different question,” Liddy remarked. “Are duplicated ballots tabulated [in the] Maricopa County general election 2022?”

“If they’re duplicated correctly and they’re configured correctly, yes, they should be,” Parikh confirmed.

“Thank you,” Liddy concluded. “No further questions.”

That’s how effective cross-examination is done, boys and girls.

The Arizona Republic continues:

Testimony: County had sloppy chain of custody system

Heather Honey of Haystack Investigations, a Pennsylvania company that worked as a subcontractor on the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of the 2020 election, testified that the county had a sloppy chain of custody system and, referring to affidavits as part of the lawsuit’s 7,000-plus pages of exhibits, how Runbeck employees allegedly could insert ballots at will into the system without a proper record. Honey is also a founder of Verity Vote, an election-security [conspiracy theory] investigation company that reported in October that a Pennsylvania sent 255,000 ballots to unverified voters, a claim Pennsylvania officials dispute.

Runbeck employee Denise Marie, who’s expected to testify on the trial’s second day, stated in an affidavit that employee family members were allowed to turn in ballots to the company’s Phoenix facility in violation of Arizona law. Honey, who had interviewed Marie as part of her review of Maricopa County’s 2022 election, suggested — as the lawsuit does — that any number of unaccountable ballots could have been inserted into the system this way. She theorized that the county’s failure to follow procedural rules and the law must have been purposeful.

“Somebody,” she said, “made the decision not to do it.”

Shorter version of her testimony: “It could happen.”

Remember, the Judge requires Lake to identify specific individuals who acted with malicious intent to rig the election, as she claims, and that this intentional misconduct by identified individuals did actually affect the outcome of the election. This so-called “expert” just provided conspiracy theories and failed to provide any specific evidence required by the judge.

Richer and Jarrett, in their own testimony, described the system much differently, saying that they adhered to election procedures required by law.

Brad Bentencourt, a former technical support worker for county elections, described Election Day Problems he saw at several Scottsdale polling stations. The day felt “chaotic” with printers going down and long lines of voters. Contradicting Parikh’s testimony to some extent that toner wasn’t the printers’ problem, Bentencourt said removing toner cartridges and shaking them often seemed to work well.

Christina Ford, a lawyer with Elias Law Group for Hobbs, asked Bentencourt if he had knowledge of a plot to overturn the election.

Bentencourt seemed taken aback by the question and said he was just a worker.

Oh, it appears The Arizona Republic left early. There was one more witness for Lake.

In other words, he’s got nothing – just the conspiracy theories in his fertile imagination.

 

Finally, there is this from the QAnon Queen of the Arizona legislature who, thankfully, will not be back next year.

You don’t just “look like” idiots, you freak, you are idiots.

The second day of the trial begins at 9 a.m. Thursday.





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1 thought on “‘Krazy Kari’ Lake’s Election Challenge Is Not Going Well – Who Coulda Guessed?”

  1. Laurie Roberts of The Republic writes, “No smoking gun in Kari Lake’s lawsuit (not even a pea shooter)”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/12/22/no-smoking-gun-in-kari-lakes-lawsuit-not-even-a-pea-shooter/69749538007/

    Wednesday was Kari Lake’s big day, her chance to at long last prove that the election was rigged and she was robbed of her right to be Arizona’s next governor.

    This was her moment.

    Yet Lake and her attorneys offered no smoking gun. Not even a lightly used pea shooter.

    Instead, the day was filled with testimony about “pandemonium” at the polls, questionable handling of early ballots and even a conspiracy theory that ballot images were printed an inch too small and thus they couldn’t be counted.

    A theory that was blown to bits in just minutes, by the way.

    No evidence of an election scheme

    Here’s what we didn’t hear – what Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, in ordering the two-day trial, said he must hear for Lake to prevail:

    • That a county elections official intentionally caused ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction on Election Day, and that enough “identifiable” votes were lost to cost her the election.

    • That employees at Runbeck Election Services, the county’s ballot contractor, illegally added ballots and that the county’s failure to maintain chain of custody “was both intentional and did in fact result in a changed outcome.”

    In other words, somebody had to scheme up a plan to steal the election from Kari Lake. And there has to be evidence that the plan worked.

    Of that, we heard crickets.

    Well, mostly crickets. We did hear from Heather Honey, a Lake investigator who also worked on the Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election. Honey testified that she was told by a Runbeck worker that employees were allowed to bring their early ballots to work and add them to the vote count. [hearsay evidence.] She described it as a perk of the job.

    “Employees were permitted to bring their ballots from home and add them to the in-bound scan,” said Honey, who also worked on the Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election.

    According to Honey, the whistleblowing employee saw 50 such ballots added to the vote count.

    Lake lost to Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs by 17,117 votes.

    The ballot tabulator ‘bombshell’ that wasn’t

    Honey also claimed that the county – contrary to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s testimony – didn’t maintain proper chain of custody of early ballots dropped off on the Election Day, allowing all manner of potential funny business to ensue. She bases this upon the Runbeck whistleblower’s say-so [hearsay evidence] and the fact that the county hasn’t yet turned over any Election Day chain-of-custody records to the Lake campaign.

    The most bizarre claim of the day came from Clay Parikh, Lake’s Alabama-based cyber security expert. Parikh spoke in August at Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth” summit in Springfield, Mo., a weekend conference dedicated to conspiracy theories. Lindell flew him in for the event and paid for his lodging.

    He also was flown in to testify at Lake’s trial.

    Parikh dropped what was supposed to be a bombshell – his assessment that the county’s printers were spitting out 19-inch ballot images onto 20-inch paper, causing the ballots to be rejected by the tabulators. Such a thing could only happen, he said, if the system was set up to allow it.

    “It could not be by accident,” he testified.

    It all sounded very conspiratorial, until Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy asked Parikh whether a rejected ballot would then be duplicated and run back through the tabulation machines to ensure the vote was counted.

    “The duplicated ballot would be tabulated,” Parikh replied. “Yes, it should be.”

    It’s a high bar, and Lake’s not even close

    Lake was evidently impressed with his testimony.

    “That’s what we call a smoking gun,” her Kari Lake War Room tweeted.

    That’s what I call a swing and a miss.

    Lake’s attorneys spent four and a half hours presenting their case on Wednesday. They have one more hour on Thursday and one more witness: pollster Rich Baris, the self-proclaimed “People’s Pundit” [for the Falun Gong Epoch Times] whose polls are not included in FiveThirtyEight polling averages due either to bad methodology or poor results.

    It seems Baris did an exit poll of 813 Maricopa County voters and from that concluded that anywhere from 15,603 to 29,257 of Lake’s supporters were unable to vote.

    I’m guessing Judge Thompson will give that vital, scientific conclusion all of the credibility it’s due. [Sarcasm.]

    I’m also guessing Lake is in trouble here.

    The judge has set a high bar here. Based on what has thus far been presented in court, Lake won’t reach it while standing on Mike Lindell’s shoulders.

    Wearing stilts. With a pile pillows under the warrior’s feet.

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