BOOMERANG: Failing Republican’s witnesses hurt her election challenge in Arizona

BOOMERANG: Failing Republican's witnesses hurt her election challenge in Arizona

Granted one more shot at her election challenge, the failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate brought witnesses who only damaged her cause.

Kari Lake needed her witnesses to convince a court that signature verification on ballots was not carried out or that it was carried out in a way that was inadequate or wrong.

She and her allies seem to think they did so successfully and celebrated on social media afterward, boasting that they’d proven the corruption and failure of the system.

That doesn’t really reflect what her witnesses actually said, though.

Her ‘whistleblower,’ Andy Myers, for instance, essentially testified that the speed at which signatures were verified was too fast (in his opinion) and that he was surprised not to see more ballots needing curing. In the process, he testified that he and others did verify signatures and cure ballots.

The problem with his testimony, ultimately, is that Myers seems to have no scope of how many people were working on completing the election process and expected around 300,000 ballots to take weeks rather than three days.

In fact, this kind of conjecture — the notion that the process was ‘too fast’ or that a specific witness ‘didn’t see’ certain actions — seems to be the entire basis of Team Lake’s ‘stolen election’ claims. The Arizona Republic reports:

“Maricopa County Elections Director Rey Valenzuela testified that signature review was going on in three county offices, not just the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center where Myers was working. Valenzuela said the county had upwards of 60 or 70 employees reviewing signatures.”

Paul Weich is an experienced Arizona attorney and author of the AZ Law Blog who attended the hearing.

He told WashingtonPress exclusively that the “Defendants’ attorneys visibly relaxed at many key moments.”

“The mood in the courtroom was that Lake’s witnesses actually assured a(nother) legal loss for Kari. They told the truth, that Maricopa County had a robust signature verification process in place,” says Weich.

Lake’s attorney argued that a rate of 3 seconds per ballot proved that workers doing signature verification were not doing so with sufficient caution and attention.

There’s no assertion of exactly how long a signature must be studied for verification, though.

He also argued that some reviewers had very high acceptance rates.

But the failed Arizona Republican candidate’s counsel also admitted that the supervisors could see what reviewers were doing and warned them that they’d be monitored. Rather than undercutting any suggestion that reviewers would fail to adhere to standards, his arguments buttressed the defense.

Another of Lake’s witnesses also testified about the review process, noting that it’s not a single-step process. When a signature is rejected, it moves on to a level two reviewer.

The second witness also testified that the workers were warned their reviews was constantly being audited, reinforcing the necessity to get it right.

Kari Lake is celebrating and her fans in Arizona.

Her true believers are tweeting their certainty that the only way her case can fail is if the judge is corrupt.

The truth, though, is that she hasn’t made a very effective case.

Check out her War Room’s tweet below, with a video clip of her whistleblower.

Watch him leap to conclusions at dazzling heights about what he did and didn’t witness, then keep scrolling for a word from her attorney.

Story continues below the tweet:

Lake is also expressing great confidence in the following clip of her attorney.

He’s not really making a quantifiable argument.

There’s no statement about how long a signature verification should take, if not under three seconds, or about how “long enough” would be defined.

He merely claims the actual rate was too fast and resulted in too much approval.

Stephanie Bazzle

Steph Bazzle is a news writer who covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph. Sign up for all of her stories to be delivered to your inbox here: