Maricopa election officials illegally breaking into sealed election machines after they were tested, reprogramming memory cards, and reinstalling them.
59% of these machines would shut down on election day in GOP areas.
Maricopa County elections officials pushed back on Republican Kari Lake’s claim of fraud in Arizona’s gubernatorial race in court Thursday, offering new details about printing problems that delayed the counting of some votes.
Lake, who lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November, sued in an effort to overturn the election. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson allowed a two-day trial, which concluded late Thursday afternoon, on two of the 10 claims she made in her initial complaint. Thompson did not say when he would issue a ruling.
In Lake’s trial, though, her legal team did not offer evidence of intentional misconduct or of votes being improperly counted or rejected. Instead, Lake’s team broadly criticized Maricopa County’s management of the election and claimed that long lines led Republican would-be voters to turn away on Election Day.
Tom Liddy, a lawyer for Maricopa County, faulted Lake’s campaign and the Arizona Republican Party for casting doubt on the validity of early and mail-in votes, which left GOP voters bearing the brunt of minor issues on Election Day.
Election workers like Gates have experienced a rise in threats following the 2020 election and former President Donald Trump’s election lies. Gates, a Republican, told NBC News ahead of the election that he had been working with local law enforcement amid “vile emails and social media posts.”
At a press conference Monday, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said he’d recommended Gates and his family go to a safe location for one night because of threats that were still under investigation.
“I’m always going to err on the side of overreacting to keep people safe,” Penzone said. “Until I felt that our detectives had a chance to get their arms around any potential threats that may do harm to him or his family, I was not going to allow for them to be in harm’s way.”
Penzone said there had been a large number of threats toward election officials in the state, with some coming from social media and from out of state. “We are not going to tolerate it,” he said.
A Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting last week grew tense as some attendees pushed conspiracy theories, berated officials and even demanded that the election be nullified.
Maricopa, which was the heart of pro-Trump election denialism in 2020, became a flashpoint during this year’s elections as technicians scrambled to fix dozens of malfunctioning vote tabulation machines on Election Day. It took hours before a solution was identified, prompting officials to rebuff claims that the integrity of the election was compromised. Officials at the time urged voters at polling sites where machines had malfunctioned to exercise other options, including either dropping their ballots off in a secure box or going to another location to vote.
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