Kari Lake, an attorney, reveals Maricopa County’s data exposes major problem with 334K ballot review.

Arizona Republican Kari Lake Challenges Democrat Katie Hobbs’ Victory in Governor’s Race

Attorney Kurt Olsen Claims Maricopa County Verified Over 334,000 Mail-In Ballots

Arizona Republican Kari Lake is challenging Democrat Katie Hobbs’ victory in November’s governor’s race. Kurt Olsen, Lake’s attorney, claimed in court on Wednesday that a review of data from Maricopa County showed at least 334,000 mail-in ballots were not verified. Hobbs won the contest by approximately 17,000 votes, but Lake is questioning the legitimacy of tens of thousands of those ballots.

• Over 264,000 ballots were reviewed for vote signature matches at a rate less than 3 seconds
• 70,000 ballots were reviewed at a rate of less than 2 seconds
• Level 2 reviewers were so overwhelmed that they simply didn’t look at the signatures that were piling up on their desk

Olsen further said, “What that log data shows, your honor, is that over 274,000 ballots were approved at less than three seconds each. That includes one signature verifier who approved 100 percent of the 26,900 signatures that he verified at less than 3 seconds a signature.”

Whistleblowers Speak Out Against Maricopa County’s Signature Verification Process

Lake’s legal team met with three whistleblowers “who were intimately involved in the signature verification process in Maricopa County.” They rejected tens of thousands of signatures, up to the tune of maybe 130,000 ballots. And then somewhere above them in the chain of command, they were just being sent on through,” the Republican said. She asserted that because of this lax verification process, hundreds of thousands of bad ballots were injected into the system.

VoteBeat Arizona journalist Jen Fifield reported in March that in the 2022 general election, “workers marked 18,510 signatures as ‘non-matching,’ and of those, 15,411 voters confirmed it was their ballot, or ‘cured’ their ballot. That led to 3,099 rejected for bad or missing signatures. Of those, 1,299 were missing signatures and 1,800 were bad.”

County Recorder Stephen Richer defended Maricopa’s signature review process in the 2022 election, telling Fifield some improvements had been made since 2020.

Lake told Bannon that her legal team is prepared to show the systemic failure of the entire signature verification process. “Signature verification is one of the only methods to verify that a mail-in ballot would be authentic, and the process we have in Maricopa County is a complete sham. They’re not following the law at all,” she said.

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