Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s Clown Show Crashes In Court

State Sen. Sonny Borrelli is a QAnon loving election denier conspiracy theorist in the same vein as state Sen. Wendy Rogers, Rep. Mark Finchem and lesser known Rep.Leo Biasiucci. GOP legislators spoke at a QAnon convention chock full of conspiracies and hate.

Wanting his 15 minutes of fame (no doubt for grifting off the MAGA/QAnon rubes), Sen. Borrelli filed a belated election challenge, represented by lawyers from the GQP’s voter suppression organization, True The Vote.

The Arizona Sun Times reported, State Rep. Sonny Borrelli Files Lawsuit Contesting Maricopa County’s Election Results:

One [election challenge] lawsuit was filed on Monday [past the filing deadline] by State Senator Sonny Borrelli (R-Lake Havasu), challenging the use of AI to verify signatures, which Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has stated is illegal.

Attorneys for the election integrity [GQP voter suppression] organization True the Vote drafted the complaint. It asserted, “Maricopa County ran 1.3 million images, on monitors, past the eyes of a few dozen of its Signature Verifiers at such a rapid clip that it was physically impossible for them to verify the Delegated Software’s adjudications about those images reliably.” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht told The Arizona Sun Times, “Many voters in Mohave County reported concern that their votes were being diluted by events in Maricopa County. We listened, retained counsel, and got to work. This litigation seeks to uncover the source of their concerns. We look forward to seeing it tried in court.”

See, the Texas Monthly, How True the Vote Fabricates Claims of Election Fraud, for Fun and Profit.

Filed in Mohave County Superior Court [proper venue is Maricopa County Superior Court] and naming Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Maricopa County Supervisors, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer as defendants, the lawsuit also represents Mohave County voters. It seeks to nullify the gubernatorial election results. It included exhibits containing emails and contracts between Maricopa County Elections employees and third-party vendor Runbeck Election Services arranging to use AI for signature verification. Earlier this year, an attorney for Maricopa County admitted AI is used for signature verification, prompting concern by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.

The complaint stated that the [Maricopa] county “failed to set standards or provide guidance of any sort for (1) adjustments that might be made to the Delegated Software’s settings during the ballot count, (2) recruiting and hiring people tasked with operating the software (‘the Signature Verifiers’), (3) adequate training for the Signature Verifiers, (4) reliable back-up systems, or (5) mechanisms for appeal or review of rejected ballot signatures.” The complaint said this led to a large number of mail-in and drop box ballots that were “counted when they should not have passed a proper verification system, thereby diluting the voting strength of voters in other counties, including Mohave County.” [The bogus vote dilution theory.]

The lawsuit discussed how AI can have “inevitable, often unconscious cognitive biases” due to human programming, citing Amazon’s AI recruitment that favored hiring white males, facial recognition systems performing more accurately on lighter-skinned faces, and Microsoft’s Tay Twitter chatbot learning conversational skills from trolls that taught it to say repugnant things.

The complaint explained how the Verus Pro software used by Runbeck to verify signatures creates a “confidence score” for each signature match. “It is beyond the limits of human nature for these Signature Verifiers not to be influenced by the seemingly authoritative, but actually opaque and unproven, conclusions of the Delegated Software,” the complaint contends.

.A.R.S. 16-550(A) does not authorize the use of AI for signature verification. It states in part, “Except for early ballots tabulated as prescribed in section 16-579.02, on receipt of the envelope containing the early ballot and the ballot affidavit, the county recorder or other officer in charge of elections shall compare the signatures thereon with the signature of the elector on the elector’s registration record.” Additionally, the complaint objected to Runbeck’s involvement at all, “Nothing in Arizona election laws authorizes a county to outsource signature verification to a non-government third party.” The State Election Procedures Manual doesn’t contain any authorization for Runbeck either.

1. Maricopa County uses a bipartisan team of HUMANS to verify each signature on early ballot envelopes.
2. AI was used prior to 2022 to sort sigs into potentially good/potentially bad before human review.
3. County told me that AI sorting was not used in this election. https://t.co/K34xHrFf81

— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) December 15, 2022

FWIW, Maricopa County turned off the confidence indicator it was using prior to this election to sort potentially bad/potentially good signatures, according to @stephen_richer. (And humans have always done the final decision making.)

Sooooo there's that.

— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) December 16, 2022

OK then. The case was heard on Friday. Borrelli’s team of lawyers’ incompetence became even more apparent.

The Arizona Mirror reports, Judge dismisses Borrelli election suit for failure to serve defendants:

An election lawsuit brought by Lake Havasu Republican Sonny Borrelli that challenged the election of Katie Hobbs as Arizona governor was dismissed late Friday afternoon.

Borrelli filed the suit Monday, on behalf of Mohave County voters, who he claimed were disenfranchised by the unlawful use of artificial intelligence to verify signatures on ballot envelopes in Maricopa County in the 2022 midterm.

In the suit, Phoenix lawyer Ryan Heath, representing Borrelli and Mohave County voters, wrote that the use of third party artificial intelligence software to make initial scans and give a verification ranking to voter signatures in Maricopa County led untrained workers to accept bad signatures. He argues that the number of ballots with unmatching signatures accepted in Maricopa County because of the AI disenfranchised Mohave County voters by “diluting” the impact of their votes.

Heath is yet another right-wing grifter, i.e., The Gavel Project. Note “the ultimate objective was aways to create optimal circumstances for litigation,” in order to keep the rubes’ money flowing to my 501(c)(3).

Attorney for Sen. Borrelli in election contest compares his work representing students against mask wearing to Montgomery bus boycott pic.twitter.com/dhuEYLG5Mk

— Jen Fifield (@JenAFifield) December 17, 2022

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer refuted [the AI allegation] in a statement to the Arizona Republic.

“Maricopa County has never used artificial intelligence to verify signatures on early ballot envelopes. All signatures are verified by humans — both at the initial review level and at the manager level,” Richer said in the statement.

Heath wrote that the impact of the allegedly wrongly accepted signatures was so large that it swayed the results of the governor’s race. Republican Kari Lake lost that race to Democrat Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes.

Heath is the president and CEO of The Gavel Project, which describes itself as an “anti woke nonprofit legal organization.”

Hobbs and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, along with other county officials who were named defendants in the suit, haven’t had a chance to officially refute the claims because they still haven’t been served with summonses in the suit. 

No one from the Board of Supervisors attended Friday’s hearing and Andy Gaona, an attorney representing Hobbs as secretary of state, said he only learned of the court date because a reporter told him about it.

“This is a fundamental failure of the plaintiffs to comply with the statutes,” Gaona said.

You don’t say!

Heath blamed his failure to serve the defendants in a timely manner on an automatically created court summons that incorrectly gave the defendants 20 days instead of five to respond. Heath said it took several days to correct the error, and advised the judge not to worry about defendants not being served.  WTF?

In one election challenge, the attorney repeatedly misnamed the defendant.

In this one, they didn't even bother serving the defendants.

There's a reason that you aren't seeing experienced, or even competent, attorneys on these cases. https://t.co/AWmVAxZBrt

— Jim Small (@JimSmall) December 16, 2022

Gaona called that “ridiculous” and asked for the case to be dismissed, especially considering that Heath made no effort to reach out to any of the defendants to inform them of the case and explain the delay in serving them with summonses. 

Heath said he wanted to ensure that the summonses included the correct time frame to respond, because he believed if they didn’t, the defendants would take the opportunity to drag out the case.

Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen responded that Heath was wrong, because Gaona had been served with a summons in another elections contest case that also had the incorrect number of days for response listed, and responded to it expeditiously, Jantzen said. 

“It’s a mistake on your part to think that’s what would have happened,” Jantzen told Heath.

Jantzen also pointed out that the plaintiffs in other election cases in his courtroom had the same issue with their summonses, but still served them anyway.

Heath asked for a five-day extension of the elections contest timeline, to give him time to serve the defendants, but Jantzen denied it, saying there just wouldn’t be enough time under state law to see the case through. 

[In] Arizona, suits challenging election results can’t be filed until the results are certified by the state, and this year that happened Dec. 5. The cases are expedited in the courts, with tightly prescribed deadlines, since newly elected officials take office in January.

“I’m finding specifically that we cannot process a contested election case within this timeframe,” Jantzen said. “It’s no longer possible to get this done before the end of the year.” 

Jantzen added that removing the portion of the suit regarding election practices in Maricopa County from the portion contesting the results of the governor’s race would give Heath and Borrelli more time to properly serve the defendants with summonses and otherwise prepare their case.

[Jantzen] is allowing the portion of the suit pertaining to ballot signature verification in Maricopa County to continue as a civil case, with a much more relaxed timeline than election challenges, which are expedited.

In the portion of the case not tied to the governor’s race, Heath asked for a jury trial; demanded the court declare the use of third-party software in signature verification on Arizona ballot affidavits illegal; asked the the court to enjoin Maricopa County from “using unproven third party software vendors and AI to determine the validity of ballot affidavit signatures;” and mandate that Arizona extend the time allowed after elections for signature verification.

UPDATE: Judge dismisses election contest brought by Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borelli (R) & Mohave County voters seeking to throw out Maricopa County's votes in the governor's race. The case will continue as a civil lawsuit challenging election procedures. https://t.co/OyKSyyJ8hb

— Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) December 17, 2022

There is no remedy to overturn an election “next year.” A court cannot grant such extraordinary relief not provided for in law. And Borrelli’s clown show lawyers have no case for their bogus “vote dilution” theory based upon their false AI signature match theory. The plaintiffs and their lawyers are eventually headed for defeat and sanctions imposed in this case.