Phillip Kline Says Kari Lake’s Lawsuit Reveals ‘Serious Flaws’ in Maricopa County’s Handling of Election

Neil Jones

Former Kansas Attorney General Phillip Kline (R) shared his thoughts on Republican Kari Lake’s lawsuit contesting the 2022 general election, saying the allegations shed light on severe issues in Maricopa County’s handling of the election.

“Despite media claims, Lake’s lawsuit reveals serious flaws in Maricopa’s handling of mail-in ballots-violations of procedures and possibly law. If the suit is dismissed it is due to gaps in AZ law, not lack of substance,” Kline tweeted in response to a New York Times article covering Lake’s lawsuit.

The Arizona Sun Times reached out to the Lake campaign for a response but did not hear back before publishing.

Lake submitted her lawsuit last week at the tail end of the election challenge window. At 70 pages, the complaint brings forth a plethora of reasons and evidence to suggest the 2022 election results should be discounted.

Under Arizona law, Maricopa County residents who vote early must return that ballot in a closed envelope containing an affidavit signed by the voter. Those signatures are then compared to the ones the county has on file to affirm the vote’s legitimacy, and mismatches would be rejected or cured with additional information from the voter. However, Lake shared Maricopa County election worker testimonies sharing that county signature verification managers pushed “rejected ballots back through the system with the hope that they would be un-rejected,” which could have accounted for thousands of votes. Lake also shared that a third party, Star Center, was involved with the curing process to reverse rejected ballots but was allegedly not supervised.

Also relating to early ballots were some alleged chain of custody violations. According to the complaint, “hundreds of thousands” of mail-in ballots dropped off or delivered through the postal service were given to a third-party signature verification service, Runbeck, on Election Day to obtain electronic images of the ballot signatures. However, a Runbeck employee allegedly observed nearly 300,000 early ballots dropped off without the proper chain of custody paperwork accompanying it, which is a class 2 misdemeanor. Additionally, an alleged 25,000 ballots were found two days after the election and added to the total, which Lake stated showed an additional chain of custody violations.

“Using private vendors to cure ballots, unilateral and anonymous reversals of decisions to allow ballots that were rejected under law, using interim facilities or methods to handle ballots w/out the required presence of both parties were all tools of the left in 2020,” Kline said.

Moreover, Lake’s lawsuit makes several other allegations against Maricopa County, including that they suppressed and disenfranchised voters through Election Day technical errors, that those errors were caused purposefully, and that the county had a conflict of interests while conducting the election.

As reported by The Sun Times, Lake made her first appearance in court regarding this challenge on Tuesday. The hearing was not to argue the case but determine its schedule going forward. A representative for Secretary of State and Governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D) said her office is planning to file a motion to dismiss the case on Thursday. Lake will have until Saturday to respond. Should the judge not dismiss the case, evidentiary hearings are set to be held on December 21st and 22nd.

Following the hearing, Lake released an update video to her followers explaining the basics of her lawsuit.

“The world is watching what happens here. We, the people of Arizona, demand honest elections, and we won’t stop until we get them,” Lake said.

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Neil Jones is a reporter for The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Neil on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Phillip Kline” by Liberty University. Photo “Kari Lake” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

 

 

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