Whistleblower exposes ballot issues in Maricopa County during curing process. How did it occur?

Whistleblower Testifies in Kari Lake’s Election Challenge Trial

Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is challenging the legitimacy of tens of thousands of ballots in the 2022 election. A whistleblower testified in court on Wednesday about problematic practices Maricopa County officials employed during the mail-in ballot voter verification process.

The process in Maricopa County is that ballots rejected by Level 1 reviewers go to Level 2 reviewers, who either decide the signatures match and send the ballots through for counting or determine the signatures do not match and seek to contact the voter to confirm identity. This is called curing.

The whistleblower testified that the county turned down reviewers’ offer to cure ballots identified as having mismatched signatures in the days after the election. Additionally, the whistleblower testified that she and her fellow Level 1 reviewers were sent home early despite the massive number of ballots the county needed to verify and count.

Lake attorney Kurt Olsen told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson Wednesday that a review of data from the county showed at least 334,000 mail-in ballots were in effect not verified.

• Over 264,000 ballots were reviewed at a rate less than 3 seconds
• 70,000 ballots were reviewed at a rate of less than 2 seconds

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.”

A total of approximately 1.5 million ballots were cast in Maricopa County in November.

The whistleblower also noted that reviewers were catching signatures of individuals that didn’t even belong in the history, meaning that the names and addresses were completely different. She said the reviewers were told to report those major discrepancies to their supervisors.

Lake is questioning the legitimacy of tens of thousands of ballots, and the whistleblower’s testimony adds to the mounting evidence of problematic practices in Maricopa County’s mail-in ballot voter verification process.

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