The Arizona Supreme Court has returned to trial court Kari Lake’s complaint alleging systemic signature verification inadequacies in Maricopa County. Further investigation into the county’s signature verification software reveals an alarmingly low criterion for signature verification to meet the requirements as “high-confidence” matches.
Reports show Lake has continued to challenge the results of the Arizona gubernatorial election in 2022, which she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by a margin of about 17,000 votes. She claims many voters were disenfranchised on Election Day due to voting machine errors at nearly 60% of Maricopa County polling places. Lake has asked for the election results to be nullified or for her to be proclaimed the victor.
Since Lake is contesting the failure to comply with the existing policy instead of the policy itself, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled last week that her complaint was not filed too late and remanded the case back to the trial court, where it had initially been dismissed.
The Verus Pro program used by the election contractor evaluates signature matches on a scale of 0 to 100, according to emails exchanged between Maricopa officials and a worker from the county’s vendor, Runbeck Election Services.
According to an email from a county administrator, only scores “less than 10” are not indicated as Approved by Verus Pro.
In an email to Runbeck sent last October, Maricopa County election supervisor Rey Valenzuela described the implementation of Verus Pro for the general election in ’20 as a “shit show.”
According to a report, Kari Lake claims that there are hundreds of thousands of ballots from the November 2022 election that still need to have signatures verified as part of her election challenge, but Maricopa County’s Recorder Steve Richter said she could not look at the ballots as it would be for the good of the people to deny her.
The legal team for Kari Lake was denied a public records request by Maricopa County that would have allowed them to examine the early ballot affidavit envelopes.
The team stated that Maricopa County’s denial of this request for open records indicates they are corrupt. The legal team is confident these signed envelopes will prove the case satisfies the legal requirement of establishing uncertainty.
