Ben Johnson of Spalding County, Georgia, meets with Macias, a Security Consultant, and the Importance of Fairness in Elections
Johnson was appointed chairman of Spalding County’s election board last year, after Georgia’s GOP-led legislature passed a law that changed rules for board membership. The county board was turned over to Republican control.
Board Chairman Ben Johnson stated that they hang their political hats at the door when they come in. There is no place for politics in elections.
Johnson might not be able to leave his stated beliefs at the door. An election-conspiracy believer, Johnson has authored a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and proclaimed that Joe Biden “is an illegitimate president.”
He called for banning voting machines, early voting, and mail-in voting on social media and posted a photo of himself with the MyPillow founder.
Johnson’s conspiracy-laden beliefs have shown up in his work on the board. As first reported by The Guardian, Johnson falsely claimed in a board meeting last year that a judge had ruled Dominion voting machines were “illegal” in Georgia. He led the board in not renewing the contract because he was concerned about the expense of the contract, as well as the company’s ability to respond quickly to any election-day issues. Some people, including Sidney Powell, have brought defamation suits against Fox News and One America News, accusing them of lying with baseless claims that its machines enabled vote fraud.
There are many people in the election process that are not of the same political opinion as Johnson. In Colorado,Michigan,Nevada and other states, election officials have seen an increase in the risk of election equipment being sabotaged or used to stir voter distrust.
To be sure, election regulations, long-standing rules on auditing and testing of machines, and other layers of oversight offer safeguards for the electoral process.
Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant who has worked on elections for 30 years, said that actions that cast doubt on fairness of the election can have an impact on the perception of the election’s outcome.
“It is inconceivable that we will have anybody on the election board that does not believe in fair elections,” Dexter Wimbish, a Democrat who sits on the election board with Johnson, told CNN. “That just makes no sense to me.”
The move leaves the county primarily relying on its elections supervisor and trained staff to fix any mechanical or software problems that might arise in this November’s election.
The proposal to hire an outside company to copy election data was being investigated by Georgia’s secretary of state.
Emails show that Johnson was involved in the effort to hire the firm SullivanStrickler to obtain forensic images of the county’s election system.
In August of 2021, Johnson wrote to the board members and the elections supervisor about moving forward quickly unless there were any concerns.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
Investigating Spalding County Election Integrity Matters: Attorney General Corey Sullivan Strickler Tells CNN about Election Frauds in Michigan
An attorney for SullivanStrickler said the company is continuing to work with law enforcement in the investigation of election integrity matters.
An attorney representing the Spalding County elections board told CNN Wednesday that a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, intends to subpoena Johnson and two other Spalding County officials. As CNN has reported, that grand jury is looking into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state.
The head of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs was worried about what would happen. “And that’s why we’ve called for the attorney general to investigate, because somebody has got to go in and make sure laws that we know of aren’t being broken.”
The harassment of election officials has gone on for over two years because of the relentless, baselessMAGA campaign to claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. In the past three years, 45 of 100 election directors in North Carolina have left, while Texas has seen a 30% turnover rate.
That exodus has led to the hiring of many new election officials. Some, through inexperience, have made mistakes that could feed further distrust – or, as one Michigan clerk found, unintentionally enable conspiracists.
Lake Township Clerk Korinda Winkelmann told state authorities investigating voting machine breaches that she turned over a tabulator and a laptop computer that served as a poll book to an unnamed person who claimed to be an investigator conducting an audit of the election. She told investigators she didn’t know she had to turn over a tabulator, but did because they were doing an audit. She said she “believes” there was election fraud in 2020, though not in her township, according to a police report from February. Winkelmann declined comment to CNN.
She told CNN that she was terrified. I didn’t trust them from the beginning. But I was told they’d contacted … the county clerk, and that she had said, ‘yes’ to the audit, which makes no sense.”
The video was obtained by CNN and reported by the Record-Eagle. Keller is seen asking if the men are from the state.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
State Election Conspiracists Are Outraged by the Unelected Bureaucratic Office of Elections in Michigan, Sustained by a Candidate Tera Jackson
Authorities eventually determined that the plot to access the tabulator traced back to a woman named Tera Jackson, who claimed to be in touch with then-Trump attorney Powell and to have evidence of fraud tied to data stored on a satellite owned by the Vatican. Jackson pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disturbing the peace in connection with the incident. No one else was charged.
It was a stupid mistake. Keller said that he was too scared to do anything. I was intimidated as I was so new to being a clerk.
Election conspiracists in Michigan have managed to gain access to at least five other vote-counting machines, called tabulators, and in some cases also to the software used to operate them.
The clerk of Adams Township was stripped of his election duties last year, after she spread election misinformation and refused to allow routine maintenance on voting machines. That has forced Hillsdale County to take over running Adams Township’s elections since October 2021, Abe Dane, chief deputy clerk of the county, told CNN in an email.
Scott is spreading misinformation, saying that our Hart InterCivic election management system and tabulating machines are connected to the internet or have voter specific data. In August, in an email obtained by CNN, Scott told other clerks in the state to “uphold election integrity” by ignoring a directive about voting data from the Michigan Bureau of Elections, which she called “the unelected bureaucratic office.”
Scott’s attorney, Stefanie Lambert, said her client refused to comply with a directive she contends violated the law. Lambert reiterated the baseless claim that the state’s elections are not secure.
Schroeder isn’t alone in drawing state oversight. In the June primary, there were incorrect ballots sent out and a recent mistake, which caused a supervisor to be appointed for the upcoming elections in Pueblo County, which was run by a Democrat. Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, a Republican who lost in the primary, was prohibited from overseeing the election. She is accused of allowing unauthorized people to violate her county’s elections system to find out what she thought was fraud in the 2020 election. She has not been found guilty.
There are opportunities for election deniers to attack the system if they fly under the radar. “Those election deniers who intentionally work to undermine the election will be caught, but at the expense of voter confidence.”
He said that they were very surprised and disappointed. “Likely, it’s a result of the media sources and politicians they listen to, mainly on the Republican side, promoting this disinformation.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
Eviction of Electronic Voting Machines in Nye County, Nevada: Reply to the ACLU and Call for Supreme Court Action against Democratic Candidate Mark Kampf
For example, in Nye County, Nevada, a veteran GOP Clerk called it quits in August after 22 years working for the party.
The final straw was when the County Commissioners voted to have the ballot count done by hand in 2022, based on suspicions of voting machines.
Her replacement, interim clerk Mark Kampf, insists that Trump won in 2020, and that voters in Nye County no longer trust electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure.
Kampf plans to make Nye County one of the first in the nation to switch to hand-counting paper ballots, using electronic machines only for a preliminary tally this November. Frank Carbone said that the commission hopes to get rid of the machines completely in the future.
Nevada election officials, including GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, have fought back against misinformation, saying their electronic voting machines have been reliable and accurate, haven’t been hacked, don’t have modems and can’t connect to the internet. Ballots can be verified by paper record, as noted by Cegavske.
On October 17, the ACLU filed an emergency request to Nevada’s Supreme Court challenging Kampf’s hand-count plan. The group asked the court to rule by October 21, four days before county officials plan to start hand-counting mail-in ballots. Kampf did not return multiple calls from CNN.
Jim Hindle was the clerk andtreasurer of Storey County, a small county with 4,000 voters outside of Reno. Hindle is one of six Nevada Republicans who signed a false certificate pledging to give the state’s electoral votes to Trump, even though Biden won Nevada.
Hindle, who is vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party, replaces Doreayne “Dore” Nevin, who left her post early after losing the June GOP primary to Hindle. It breaks my heart that I don’t have a political agenda, but I do love my job and that is the reason I did not run for office.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
The Case for the Copies that Stayed Under Lock and Key: Attorney General Jena Griswold & a Newly-Discovered Charged Candidate
The conspiracy peddlers helped him to copy the drives in the summer of 2021. According to the office of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, Schroeder signed an affidavit stating that he made a “forensic image of everything on the election server” and “saved the image to a secure external hard drive that is kept under lock and key in the Elbert County elections office.”
He told CNN, “Every one of our Dominion machines have a wireless device in them and we have no way to verify that hasn’t been utilized” – a widely debunked conspiracy.
Schroeder “provided those copies to individuals not authorized to possess these components,” according to Griswold’s office, which launched an investigation into Schroeder, and then sued him.
Lake has offered a wide range of claims and theories. She hasn’t demonstrated that more than 17,000 votes were somehow flipped from R to D. Unless she’s carefully hiding some silver-bullet evidence (and why would she?), few Arizonans are buying her story. Her Trump-style campaign failed, and her Trump-style post-election complaints are failing as well. That’s a relief.
Voting in Cochise County, Fla., as the Donald Trump campaign grew out of an extremist and a challenge for the GOP
Voting is about to start. Colorado mailed out ballots for the November election on Monday. Key battleground states such as Arizona and Michigan already are receiving mail-in ballots. If the November elections are anything like the 2020 election, officials could find that their challenges are not over.
The biggest risk, according to LawrenceNorden, senior director of the elections and Government program at the Brennan Center, is the erosion of trust in the election and political leaders using that distrust to challenge them and undermine confidence in the American.
The confrontation in Cochise County has led to worries of potential delays in determining the winners in a state where key races remain too close to call. The deadline for Arizona counties to certify the results is 20 days after the last day of voting.
Ms. Hobbs finished with a substantial lead Tuesday night, and Ms. Lake failed to overtake her by Wednesday as her campaign and many Republican strategists had anticipated. The tensions increased over the course of the next few days as more than 220,000 ballots were dropped off on Election Day, according to officials in the most populous county in the state.
The win by Kelly, who was elected in 2020 to fill the term of the late GOP Sen. John McCain, capped a string of victories for Democrats on Friday night as ballots continued to be painstakingly tallied in the West. Kelly’s defeat of venture capitalist Blake Masters, who had echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, marked yet another rejection by voters of a Trump-backed candidate who Democrats portrayed as an extremist.
Democrats have one seat away from retaining control of the Senate, with just the Nevada race uncalled. If Masto wins, Democrats will have at least 50 seats needed regardless of the outcome of the Georgia Senate race. The Georgia run-off will determine control of the Senate if Laxalt wins.
Control of the House, meanwhile, remains up in the air, with 21 races still uncalled. Democrats have won 203 seats so far, while Republicans have won 211 (218 seats are needed to control the House), according to CNN projections. There are many House races in California.
Control of the US House still hangs in the balance. But it is clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be by a far more slender margin than GOP leaders had hoped. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, had hoped to emerge from those contests with a clear mandate to become the next House majority leader, but it wasn’t to be.
The Arizona Legislature’s plan for a hand count audit of rural county election results: An apology to the Arizona Department of Elections for alleged voter disenfranchisement
CNN estimates there are about 12,000 remaining, after about 10,000 ballots were counted in Washoe County.
A process called curing allows voters to correct issues with their mail ballot so that it gets counted. This can mean adding a missing signature or addressing signature-matching issues, in order to make sure the ballot is legit. The deadline to cure ballots is Monday, November 14, according to state law.
The county, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the midterms and 2020 election.
Gates expects that the county should be done counting by the early part of next week, if they continue Counting at the same pace.
She hopes Pima County will have the majority of the votes counted by Monday. She had previously told CNN that all the votes would be counted by Monday morning. On Friday night, however, she clarified that would no longer be the case due to a large batch of around 80,000 votes received from the recorder’s office earlier that day.
Gates said they were offensive to the election workers when they said they were from Masters and the Republican National Committee.
“The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa County is absolutely false and again, is offensive to these good elections workers,” he said.
On Friday night, the RNC and Republican Party of Arizona called for around the clock shifts of ballot processing until all of the votes are counted along with regular, accurate public updates. If necessary, the groups threatened to take legal action.
It takes between 10 and 12 days to complete the count over the past couple of decades. That was not the case because of what Phoenix County has decided to do. The law in Arizona sets it up so that we follow it to make sure the count is accurate.
The officials in Arizona who want to conduct a handcount audit of rural county election results are looking at a scaled down version of their proposal that could still cause chaos and delays in certifying the state’s results.
On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. But a lawyer for Cochise County Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.
Dem Demographer Mitch McConnell: The Pedestrians Lose Their Way in Bringing a New President to the White House
Trump, who saw several key endorsed candidates fizzle out in the general election, is trying to cast blame on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and gin up opposition to the Kentucky Republican ahead of Senate GOP leadership elections next week, CNN reported Friday.
McCarthy needs a majority of Republicans to become speaker, not just a majority of Republicans as McConnell does.
The chair of the House Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy on Friday. He wouldn’t say if McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus have his support for speaker, despite the fact that the meeting went well.
The string of wins Friday night marked a dramatic reversal of fortune for the Democratic party, which appeared to be in serious trouble heading into the elections. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto were laboring under President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, an unfavorable economic climate – with inflation and high gas prices pinching the budgets of families all across the country – and facing historical trends that tend to lead to steep losses in the first midterm cycle of a new president.
But this has been a complex cycle with many different crosscurrents affecting voter behavior, including the Supreme Court’s decision in June overturning abortion rights that angered many voters across the country. Republicans were also hamstrung by Trump’s decision to boost far-right candidates who were loyal to him, but often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide elections. Independent voters and moderates turned out in force to protect their incumbents, despite the fact that many of them had rejected candidates they thought were too extreme or aligned with Trump.
Mr. Finchem lost his secretary of state bid by more than a hundred thousand votes after he denied the results of the presidential race. In his suit, filed in Maricopa County, Mr. Finchem alleged that Arizona had “failed miserably” to administer a “full, fair, and secure election” and asked that the court declare the election “annulled” and name him the winner.
The one bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor – tossing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. Clark County Sheriff’s Office reminded voters of the struggles they were having when unemployment in Nevada peaked at nearly 30% during the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the economy has rebounded, Lombardo had argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and had hampered the state’s economic recovery.
The Maricopa County Elections Department (CNN) spokeswoman said the county would not approve any voter fraud in the 2020 midterm election
A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”
We can identify the results from certain locations, and reconcile the total votes against check ins to make sure it matches. This is done with political party observers present and is a practice that has been in place for decades,” the spokesperson said.
Bill Gates, the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, rejected Masters’ suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting over again, stating that “is simply not allowed for under Arizona law.” The county is in line with previous years in their pace of counting ballots.
“Let the count continue on and at the end, if they have issues they choose to take to court, they have every right to do that, and we’ll let that process play through,” Gates added.
Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds facing Democrats – even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won – because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a Navy veteran and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to successfully navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss He appealed to Republicans by promising to focus on immigration issues, and he even said in a video last year that he believed Trump would win the 2020 presidential election.
After his primary victory, Masters scrubbed his website of language that claimed the election was stolen. Under questioning from the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote counting or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. In that debate and on the trail, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.
Kelly attacked Masters as a candidate who would undermine abortion rights, as well as jeopardize Social Security and Medicare, in the course of his campaign. In a state where lawmakers passed a new ban on abortion at 15 weeks earlier this year – and where there are legal efforts underway to ban abortion in almost all cases – Kelly’s campaign kept a relentless focus on Masters’ anti-abortion stances.
Counting the Voting Goes Mad: Why Voting Counts and Election Day Glitches Haven’t Been Done
“Stop the count! Don’t count! People yelled, as they banged on the windows that were between them and the people trying to tally votes. There were false claims that ballots were being moved under the cover of night.
On the Wednesday after voting finished, Republican candidates for governor and state attorney general, who had denied the 2020 election results, conceded their races.
The nation’s election workers were on their way to passing their first real test since Donald Trump took office, and she realized it at that moment.
“I got choked up a little bit because to me that was like the affirmation that we did it,” Benson said. “We ran a smooth election. There were folks who were ready to pounce on anything. … But it didn’t work.”
There are not many races where the counting is done, and it will be a few weeks before the complete results are officially certified. Some candidates and online commentators — and Trump — have seized on Election Day glitches and the slow pace of vote counting in certain states to sow suspicion and claims of malfeasance.
It has not yet caused the chaos many feared would happen, because of a mythos of election fraud which is a core belief for many Americans on the right.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation
How Voting Goes Misinformation: The State of the Art after the Georgia Reionization Supermajority Elections, Revisited
“We need all candidates who come up short to acknowledge it and to come back and fight within our system another day, if that’s their choice,” said Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday, after winning reelection.
The country is not headed for a repeat of 2020, although civil society groups and researchers who study online narratives are worried about a lengthy post- election period of risk and uncertainty.
The Secretary of State in New Mexico says it feels like the air has been taken out of the sails. “That’s how it looks right now but I’m still in this ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ mode.”
Election deniers were declaring the vote rigged in the weeks before the election, even if they didn’t win. And less than 40% of GOP voters said before the midterms that they were very confident in their community’s poll workers.
“The scene was set that there would absolutely be fraud, and it was just a matter of needing to observe, collect and report the evidence,” said Cindy Otis, a disinformation expert and former CIA analyst.
“We had more safeguards in place in 2020 than in 2020,” said Benson. The smooth process we were able to show and convince them that would have been a futile effort deterred many from trying to intervene in the process.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation
The misinformation about election officials has been exposed by social media, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and the National Task Force on Election Security
Mainstream platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have all expanded policies intended to curb the spread of election falsehoods in recent years, from elevating credible information to labeling misleading posts to outright removing others and banning repeat offenders.
“They use the same language thousands of times to tell people that election officials are the best place to get information about elections and that they are the trusted source,” Cohen said. The goal isn’t to address a particular narrative or false information, it’s to drive back to the party that can answer the question, which is election officials.”
The payoff from that preparation was perhaps most evident in Maricopa County, Ariz., which was the focus of some of 2020’s most viral fraud conspiracy theories.
Less than an hour and a half later, officials released a video explaining the problems and reassuring voters that their ballots would be counted, because Charlie Kirk had claimed the problems were an attempt to disenfranchise Republicans.
The research coalition that focuses on misinformation around elections found that the county election websites were frequently included in the online discussion as a result of the technical issues that were mentioned on the social media sites. The websites were used to spread information.
Lawyers for Lake focused on problems with ballot printers at some polling places in the state of Arizona, where over a third of voters are from. The on-site tabulators at the polling places were unable to read the light-colored ballots produced by the printers. In some places, lines backed up due to confusion.
On election night in 2020, police on horseback were patrolling the streets around the Phoenix tabulation center, surrounded by a black security fence.
“It’s unfortunate, but it was comforting to see the election officials taken so seriously,” said a former elections official in Utah and Colorado during a briefing by the national task force on election security.
The US security agencies issued a threat advisory last October, warning of attacks on political candidates and others. And days before voting ended, a federal judge ordered one group that had been conducting surveillance of Arizona ballot drop boxes, sometimes with armed individuals, to stay at least 250 feet away and prohibited them from filming or following people.
Activists, groups monitoring for election fraud and even Trump called for protests and watch parties at ballot boxes, voting locations and counting centers. Lindsay Schubiner of the Western States Center said large-scale gatherings did not come to fruition.
She said it turned out to be a lot of talk since officials talked about voter intimidation being illegal. “There’s a huge amount that can be done on a political level by defining what’s acceptable and what’s not.”
How Voting Really Went Into Misinformation During 2022 Maricopa County Protests: The Case of Donald Trump, his Social Network, and His Facebook Page
Over the weekend, dozens of protesters showed up outside of Maricopa County’s counting site in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, in what appears to be the largest post-election protest of 2022.
“Based on what we have seen before us, there is a lack of awareness between how much can be done and how well the people will act when they are lied to,” she said.
Alternative platforms with the right that advertise few limits on what users can post has changed the landscape of social media.
The clearest example is Trump, who was banned from both social media sites, so he couldn’t reach his 100 million followers.
Trump now uses his own social network, Truth Social. His following there is smaller — 4.5 million — and while his posts are often screenshotted and shared across mainstream platforms, his reach is more limited than it was in 2020.
For example, a Truth Social post he made on Election Day calling for protests in Detroit was copied and pasted onto Twitter, but has so far failed to gain traction or get widely shared.
One challenge for those who want to question the election results is that they appear to be struggling with a narrative to advance conspiracy theories.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis won his second term easily with a 20-point margin, but the Republicans didn’t fall short of the red wave they were anticipating.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation
The State of the State’s First Congressional District: How President Trump and the fringes have impacted the political discourse over the last two elections
A user on a website wrote that “any county that hasn’t finished counting is cheating, full stop.” “[Y]eah but what happens if Kari Lake wins? That means we cheated then?” Someone replied.
While the fringe platforms have removed some of the more notorious sources of false information and conspiracy theories, they’ve created a powerful ecosystem that’s in their own right.
“You have this content delivered in many different ways,” Otis said. “They’re getting it in audio and podcasts, in newsletters, in emails, in text messages, in apps, news apps and from political campaigns — they’re just getting hammered with it. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s going viral on a mainstream platform to have continued impact.”
Even those who think that Trump won in 2020 have decided against contesting the results, a sign of the less receptive atmosphere this cycle is.
New Mexico Secretary of State Oliver pointed to her state’s 2nd Congressional District. Going into Election Day, she was worried that the House race could be a hotspot. It’s switched hands between the two major political parties each of the past three elections, and barely a thousand votes separate the two candidates this year.
Oliver thought it was great to have returned to the norm of democracy, accepting election results and the peaceful transition of power. I felt hopeful for the first time in a long time.
The court ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, who built her candidacy on her support for former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Last month, she claimed to have won the election.
The State of the Politics: Following Donald Trump Over the Cliff, a Presidential Candidate During the 2016 Covid-19 Epidemic, Revisited
“I just want to once again thank the voters of Arizona. Because of your participation, our democratic institutions thrived,” now Gov.-elect Hobbs said. “Stay engaged and keep voting.”
During an appearance on right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s talk show Thursday, she said, “I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.”
Lake continued his questions about the vote tabulation and the eventual role of the secretary of state hours before the race was projected. “Shouldn’t election officials be impartial,” Lake tweeted, a reference to the office that Hobbs holds. “The guys running the Election have made it their mission to defeat America First Republicans. It is unbelievable.
The former news anchor at Fox 10 in Phoenix was one of the leading candidates for the Governor’s job in the current cycle.
Barrett Marson, an Arizona GOP consultant who worked for Masters during the Senate primary, spoke to the wisdom of following Trump Monday night. “It’s over. The only thing Kari Lake should do now is graciously concede. The election shows that following Trump over the cliff won’t win elections.
She dispatched her primary opponents with her forceful denunciations of Democratic leaders’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic – blasting restrictions like masking as unnecessary and harmful to children. She welcomed comparisons to Trump all the way through the end of the campaign – professing at one event that she was delighted when one admirer called her “Trump in a dress.”
Wendy Rogers was invited to speak at the rally just days before the election. Ms. Rogers was censured by the State Senate after giving a speech at a far-right conference with ties to white supremacy. Referring to Ms. Rogers, Ms. Lake said she would never back away from “fighters who love this state.”
The California gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is suing the Arizona Superior Court for misspecified ballots and astrophysical consequences
Editor’s Note: Jon Gabriel is editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com and an opinion contributor to the Arizona Republic. Follow him on Twitter at @ExJon. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
In contrast with the tight and turbulent Arizona election, Monday’s certification of the state’s voting results was uneventful. It was boring, even. And most voters on both sides seem content with that.
The Democratic Secretary of State officially certified the November 8 results while seated next to the governor, attorney general and chief justice.
The bipartisan group of officials showed no sign of an ongoing battle when they smiled for the cameras. There were no protesters outside the venue, or anywhere else for that matter.
Election Day was marked by lengthy lines at polling places, malfunctioning tabulation machines and a lawsuit to extend voting hours. After a 13-day vote count, key races ended with razor-thin margins. Fraud and conspiracy accusations have been made ever since.
“This is a responsibility I do not take lightly,” outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said before signing the certification documents. “It’s one that recognizes the votes cast by the citizens of our great state. The principle of voting is fundamental to our democracy. It’s an important right and an effective method in ensuring Americans’ voices are heard.”
In 2020, the America First wing of his party ire was felt by Ducey, a conservative. During that certification, he appears to have silenced a phone call from then-President Donald Trump, focusing instead on his legal duties as governor. It became a viral moment during that crazy December.
Cochise County, in the southeast corner of the state, tried to avoid certifying its results, despite their voters choosing the GOP by a large margin. Their Board of Supervisors finally gave in after a judge ordered them to do so.
But, outside of angry statements online and in conservative media, few seem interested in challenging the results. Lake’s team keeps trying to start a parade, but nobody’s following.
Defeated Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has filed suit in Arizona Superior Court challenging the certification of the state’s election.
The chain of custody for ballots was broken at an off-site facility, where a contractor scans mail ballots to prepare them for processing. They claim workers at the facility put their own mail ballots into the pile, rather than sending their ballots through normal channels, and also that paperwork documenting the transfer of ballots was missing. The county disputes the claim.
Comment on “Litigation of Kari Lake in a Faint and Unintentional State” by A. J. Tuchi
The suit was dismissed for standing because it was full of allegations of potential injuries.
Tuchi sanctioning Lake and Finchem’s legal team to deter other baseless suits in the future. The final damages are to be announced in about a month.
The official who will handle Lake’s next suit was at the certification on Monday. The outgoing Republican Attorney General explained his position, saying that he was only a witness and shouldn’t be interpreted as taking sides in future court cases.
Many Arizonans have doubts about the election process, as we gather to solidify the results of the midterm election in 2022, according to a statement from the Attorney General.
“As attorney general, I have made it one of my office’s highest priorities to defend our election laws and advocate for changes when necessary,” he added. “I will continue to do so throughout the end of my term.”
She recently appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, accused Twitter of disabling “likes” and “retweets” on her account and pitched her upcoming appearance alongside former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell at the “America Fest” conference.
“Kari Lake needs attention like a fish needs water – and independent experts and local election officials of both parties have made clear that this was a safe, secure and fair election,” Hobbs said, calling the filing “baseless” and a “nuisance lawsuit.”
Defending the 2024 Arizona General Election Campaign by Cyber Ninjas in a Lossy Network of Election-Denial Experts
Arizona will be a key battleground in the president’s race in 2024. Leading Democratic figures, including former President Barack Obama, warned that the GOP’s embrace of Trump’s election falsehoods and conspiracy theories could put democracy at risk if they were to sweep to power.
After the election, he said he would work to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible.
A number of those cited as experts in the lawsuit and one of the lawyers who filed the case — Kurt Olsen — are part of a loose election-denial network led by Mike Lindell, the pillow company entrepreneur who has been pushing conspiracy theories about election machines since early 2021. Bryan Blehm, an attorney from Lake, acted for Cyber Ninjas during the audit of the 2020 election results in Arizona last year and represented the supervisors of Cochise County in their lawsuit against the contractor over the audit plan.
The judge noted that setting aside the results of an election has never been done in the history of the United States and that voters’ anger and frustration was acknowledged.
The lawsuit was based on speculation and contained no real facts according to Dan Barr. He said he planned to file motions to dismiss it and move it to Maricopa County early next week.
That suit was filed by Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent failed attempt to deny certification of the election results.
An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.
The Lake campaign was allowed to present evidence to support their claim that an employee of the county interfered with Election Day printers, resulting in her losing votes.
The judge ruled that she can be called to testify in her capacity as secretary of state, an office she will hold until she is sworn in as governor.
The legal losses Trump suffered as he sought to challenge his election loss are back in the news due to Saturday’s ruling.
A person who is in charge of public opinion polls testified that the technical issues at the polls could have changed the result of the race if they had been earlier. But an expert who was called to testify by election officials said there was no evidence to back up the pollster’s claim that 25,000 to 40,000 people who would normally have voted actually didn’t cast ballots as a result of Election Day problems.
“Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The court cannot accept speculation in the place of clear and convincing evidence.
The Innocuous Case of a toner failure at a Maricopa County Elections Commission: The indiscrepancy of the printers
Jarrett said in some printers, toner wasn’t dark enough – a problem that resulted in voters whose ballots couldn’t be read having to place their ballots in “door 3,” a secure box used for ballots that would need to be counted later at a central location. Thousands of votes ended up in the “door 3” boxes.
He also said that at three of the county’s 223 sites, “shrink to fit” settings were improperly selected on ballot printers by technicians who were attempting to solve those toner problems. That resulted in about 1,300 ballots being printed slightly too small for on-site tabulators to process.
He said there was no reason to believe intentional misdeeds were the cause of the problems. All of those votes, he said, were ultimately counted after they were transferred to a bipartisan duplication board.
The co-director of elections in Maricopa County, Rey Valenzuela, said that he was not aware that Runbeck employees had ever delivered a ballot directly to the Runbeck site, and that the county had never authorized those employees to do so.
The judge said that the Court’s duty was not only to incline an ear to public outcry. “It is to subject Plaintiff’s claims and Defendants’ actions to the light of the courtroom and scrutiny of the law.”
All ballots, including those affected by the printers, were counted and everyone was given a chance to vote. They are in the process of investigating the root cause of the printer problems.
The Missing Persons-Intentional-Ballot Investigation: A Case Study involving a Democrat in a U.S. Senate
Lake faced extremely long odds in her challenge, needing to prove not only that misconduct occurred, but also that it was intended to deny her victory and did in fact result in the wrong woman being declared the winner.
Her attorneys pointed to a witness who examined ballots on behalf of her campaign and discovered 14 ballots that had 19-inch (48-centimeter) images of the ballot printed on 20-inch paper, meaning the ballots wouldn’t be read by a tabulator. The witness insisted someone changed those printer configurations, a claim disputed by elections officials.
A court hearing is scheduled Thursday to present results of recounts in the races for attorney general, state superintendent and for a state legislative seat.