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Kari Lake Expert Witness: Missized Ballots That Caused Election Day Chaos Could Not Have Been An Accident

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On the first day of trial in Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge Wednesday, her lawyers focused on the Maricopa County election equipment failures that caused chaos on Election Day and disenfranchised voters. Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson previously dismissed eight out of the ten claims Lake made in her lawsuit. In his order allowing Lake’s case to go forward, Thompson said that she would have to prove that misconduct occurred, and that it resulted in “identifiable lost votes” affecting the outcome of the election.

Lake’s lawyers attempted to make that case with their bombshell revelation that a review of random ballots found that 48 out of 113 (42.5 percent) were “19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper,” causing them to be rejected.

Clay Parikh, a witness who examined the defective ballots on behalf of the Lake campaign, said someone must have changed the printer configurations.

“These are not a bump against the printer and the settings change,” he explained. “There are security configurations. I’ve reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script, which by any large organization that has to do multiple systems is the standard.”

“It takes away the human error of somebody miscoding in the instructions on the printer,” Parikh said.

When asked whether it could not have happened by accident,  Parikh said “no.”

“This one-inch discrepancy caused chaos on Election day. Causing the mass rejection of these votes as they were attempted to be read through the tabulators,” Kari Lake’s campaign wrote on Twitter, Wednesday.

In another tweet, Kari Lake’s War Room called the discrepancy “deliberate sabotage.”

“The machines should have been programmed for 19.” By Maricopa County’s own testimony, there is no such thing as an 20″ ballot,” Lake’s campaign team wrote. “Yet somehow machines in 61% of their polling centers still printed a 19″ inch ballot on a 20″ paper. Deliberate sabotage targeted at Republican turnout.”

Wednesday night, Lake herself suggested that the election was “sabotaged” with “mutant ballots.”

“They printed Mutant Ballots on Election day–using a 19″ image on a 20″ ballot paper,” she tweeted. “That’s why the tabulators rejected the ballots and that’s why chaos ensued as Lake supporters flooded Voting Center to cast ballots. Clowns & Crooks run our elections. #LakeTrial #Sabotage.”

Roving attorney Mark Sonnenklar, who took the stand as a witness for Lake, disagreed with Maricopa County’s assessment that problems in 60 percent of election day voting centers were “a small matter.”

“It was really pandemonium out there everywhere!” Sonnenklar testified.

When asked whether he had “personal knowledge” that the printing errors could have changed the outcome of the election, Sonnenklar replied, “had there not been tabulator issues at 132 vote centers, this election would have resulted—would have ended up with Kari Lake winning.”

Elections investigator Heather Honey testified that Maricopa County and its contractor Runbeck Election Services failed to follow the “legal requirements for chain of custody.”

Honey pointed to statements given to her by various individuals, including a Runbeck employee who alleged that county election workers didn’t include a key chain of custody document when delivering ballots from drop boxes on election night.

“She expressed her concern over the fact that the procedure that had been well established during the election had not been used for the large number of election day dropbox ballots that were received,” Honey said.

The investigator spoke with another woman who was an election observer at the Maricopa County Tabulation Election Center (MCTEC) on election night when the ballots came in from the dropboxes.

“Her concern,” Honey explained, “was that specifically the seals were being removed from the transport containers, and the ballots inside were not counted. That was a requirement, as she understood it, and the fact that they were just taking those ballots out of the transport containers without counting them was her primary concern.”

Honey went on to testify: “They weren’t following the legal requirements for chain of custody. There were seals on the containers when they transported them, but the specific issues were that they were just cutting them open, taking the ballots out, putting them in trays without regard to how many; there was no documentation.”

She said the county’s chain of custody problems made it impossible to determine how many votes were improperly counted in the system.

Canadian lawyer Viva Frei gave Lake high marks for what she was able to achieve in court Wednesday. “Anybody who says today’s hearing is not an abject disaster for @katiehobbs
is simply not watching the trial,” Frei tweeted. “Kari Lake is doing better than anyone could have possibly imagined, even with the limited scope of her claims before the court.”

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About Debra Heine

Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.

Photo: Republican gubernatorial candidate for Arizona Kari Lake speaks to members of the media after voting in the US midterm election, in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 8, 2022. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER TOURON/AFP via Getty Images)