By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — It was a Sunday evening, just before many people’s workweeks began, and Super Bowl playoffs were occurring. Plates might have been full, and not only of the dinnertime variety.
Still, 1,000 or more people turned up at a large meeting hall in suburban Scottsdale on Sunday, January 29, to hear Kari Lake address election integrity. They overflowed the hall. Many were left outside.
Lake, a veteran TV news anchor who has become nationally prominent for her stand for election integrity after massive suppression of Republican voters here last November 8, said she should have rented a bigger hall. As she arrived for the talk, she said, she saw people walking a half-mile from their parked cars to hear her.
Three days later, the Arizona Court of Appeals met on February 1 to consider Lake’s case after it had been dismissed on Christmas Eve by a single Maricopa County Superior Court judge, who had narrowed Lake’s 10 complaints to two before he heard them, then he limited testimony and arguments to only two days.
Critics of this judge’s approach said he was demanding that Lake provide legal proof of election officials’ improper thoughts instead of the plain evidence that numerous voters in mainly Republican areas ran into serious roadblocks on Election Day itself, even though a test of the equipment just the previous day revealed no problems.
The Arizona Court of Appeals is to issue its decision at some later time.
Concern over the election’s integrity also brought forth an inquiry by Arizona state Senate Republicans.
The establishment power structure here did all it could to exclude MAGA-endorsed Republicans from office in the 2022 general election. But Lake wasn’t going to let them off the hook after what appeared to be obvious manipulation of the outcome.
She wasn’t going to be quiet and let Maricopa County voters forget about what she described as fraud. Nor did many Republican voters seem happy about how they were treated in the election when many voting centers in Republican areas made it difficult or impossible to vote.
When she asked audience members at her January 29 talk to wave their hands who experienced 2022 election fraud, almost everyone raised their hands.
At this talk, Lake repeatedly named two top county officials who openly opposed MAGA candidates but still had retained their authority to supervise the vote count.
She also repeatedly displayed a large photo of the two men together, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer. (Additional details about this event appear in another story in this issue of The Wanderer.)
During their current terms in office, both men, considered “moderate” Republicans, expressed hostility to Republican candidates considered to be in Donald Trump’s camp. If the mere appearance of impropriety is important, these two men were unqualified to supervise voting.
An article posted November 17, 2021, at the AZ Mirror site reported on Recorder Richer creating a new political action committee, Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona.
The story said, “It’s highly unusual for an elected elections official such as Richer to get involved in elections the way he’s planning to do, and by spending in elections that his office will oversee, he may open himself up to allegations of impropriety from candidates his PAC opposes.
“Former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, a Republican who held the position from 1989 to 2017, said it’s a bad idea for Richer to run a PAC while serving as the county’s top election official,” the 2021 story continued. It added:
“. . . Purcell said people might question the results if election officials involve themselves politically in elections — particularly if a race is close. And that is doubly true now, she said, given the skepticism that many people have about the election process due to the allegations about the 2020 presidential race.”
However, the story said Richer dismissed concerns and said that candidates for his county recorder position run as members of political parties. “I think that’s a conversation that Arizona probably should have. Do we want our election officials to be partisan, elected, political actors? The reality is, we are,” Richer was quoted.
Meanwhile, just after Arizona’s hotly contested GOP primary election early last August where MAGA candidates including Lake were nominated, Supervisor Gates announced his dismay.
On August 3 the liberal Politico site posted an article reporting Arizona establishment Republicans’ alarm at primary-election results. It was headlined, “Republican ‘doomsday ticket’ ready for November.”
The Politico story quoted Gates, “The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party and, I would argue, our democracy.”
In an interview with the Phoenix area’s KTAR Radio News (92.3 FM) that was posted August 5, Gates said he didn’t want Republicans to lose elections, but he also didn’t want election deniers to serve in office.
Gates regarded the MAGA victors to be election deniers.
The KTAR News story text, which included the audio of his interview, quoted Gates: “I fear that if we continue to nominate people who deny the truth, then what may have to happen is that we lose elections. . . . Sometimes it does take going through a difficult situation like that for a party to find itself again and to again nominate people who are focused more on all of the constituents and not just a few on one far extreme or the other.”
Gates was quoted that the MAGA candidates “are not supporting our democracy,” are being “corrosive to our democracy,” that his party “went astray,” and is “doing a disservice to the voters.” Gates didn’t seem to recall that it was voters themselves who chose the nominees he despised.
The August 3 Politico story quoted Gates, “I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,” and that Gates thinks the party’s MAGA nominees “are electable, which is frightening.”
Gates considered Democrats by themselves unable to stop these nominees. But when he weighed what he considered the horrors and dangers posed by such catastrophic, “corrosive,” “frightening” GOP candidates who shouldn’t serve in office and need “humiliation,” well now, why should everything be left in voters’ hands?
The Arizona Senate’s Elections Committee has been examining the reliability and conformance with the law of last November’s Maricopa County election. Viewers at home were able to follow the livestreamed proceedings from the Senate wing of the Arizona State Capitol.
Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives.
Lake supposedly lost her gubernatorial election by less than 18,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast, while GOP attorney general nominee Abe Hamadeh supposedly lost by fewer than 300 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast. These margins are far less than the total of votes considered to have defects that nevertheless were counted.
On February 2 the Just the News site posted about the January 30 state Senate hearing, “Heather Honey, the founder of election integrity watchdog Verify Vote, testified that there was a lack of chain of custody for around 300,000 early-voting ballots dropped off in drop boxes on Election Day.”
Just the News reporter Natalia Mittelstadt wrote that Shelby Busch, the co-founder of We the People AZ, testified to the hearing “that 217,305 ballots of the 464,926 ballots fed into tabulators on Election Day in Maricopa County in 2022 were rejected.”
Busch said “that her group found multiple violations of state election law by the county. The alleged infractions include excessive ballot adjudication; the effective disenfranchisement of thousands of (mostly Republican) voters on Election Day; and around 300,000 ballots that didn’t have chain of custody,” the story said.
“Adjudication” occurs when there’s missing information or an overvote or undervote on the ballot, which is referred to a bipartisan board for consideration.
Both the 2022 and 2020 Maricopa County elections had a sharp increase in ballots referred for adjudication. The 2020 election also had been disputed over accuracy in results. “While the normal rate of adjudication isn’t greater than 4 percent, the percentage rose to 11.9 percent in 2020, then 14.36 percent in 2022,” Just the News wrote.
Mittelstadt wrote that Busch testified the previous week, at an earlier Senate committee session, “that 47,366 of verified voter signatures reviewed by her group didn’t meet the basic Arizona Secretary of State standards, showing pictures of the signatures in her presentation.”
A Radical Pro-Abort Democrat
A different article, posted February 1 at the Arizona Sun Times site, by Rachel Alexander, said that Busch’s team “submitted public-records requests to Maricopa County to investigate the 2020 and 2022 elections. Although the county turned over some of the data, there was a significant amount that it refused to or heavily redacted, which Busch is now fighting legally. One of the county’s excuses was it had misplaced the data.”
The Sun Times story said Busch “discussed discrepancies between the number of ballots listed in the system log files and the number of ballots in the CVR [Cast Vote Record]. The system log files track every ballot fed into the tabulator, and can provide one of six error codes when they aren’t accepted, she said.
“There were 15 batches of ballots, around 10,000 total, that were logged but did not make it into the final CVR, she reported,” the story said. “‘We cannot confirm that 10,000 votes were even counted,’ she said.”
Those watching the Senate livestream saw Busch testify that a video showed that as multiple voters tried to put their completed ballots into tabulator machines, only six attempts succeeded out of 50 attempts made.
The Arizona Sun Times story also said: “Busch discussed how voter records were changed electronically by someone other than the voter, and she believes it was done by progressive nonprofit groups. She discovered that in August 2020, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs implemented a new program that allowed nonprofits to access and change voter registration information online.”
Hobbs is the radical pro-abortion Democrat who campaigned for governor in 2022 by declining to debate either foe, Democrat or Republican, and stayed in her basement before supposedly beating Republican Lake narrowly in November.
Busch “examined activity modifying voter registrations, and saw that it would spike massively in the middle of the night and on holidays — she said she believes it wasn’t county staff making the changes, but likely nonprofits,” the Sun Times said. “One voter had 13 changes made to their file within a 60-day period.
“Busch said it was easy for the nonprofits to go in and modify the voter registrations; all they needed was the voter’s driver’s license number,” the story said. “She observed that the most incomplete voter registrations she found came from nonprofits. All of the nonprofits given access by the secretary of state [were] far left and backed radical election initiatives, she said.”
Livestream viewers saw Busch say she wasn’t asserting that anything nefarious was done, but the changes “seem to be self-propelled” or not requested by the voter.
Numbers Not Provided
Heather Honey, with the Verify Vote watchdog group, testified that the number of ballots picked up in an early-vote container shall be counted and recorded to ensure integrity, but Maricopa County forwarded ballots to be counted at its offsite vendor, Runbeck Election Services, without providing such numbers.
Honey said that County Recorder Richer said 275,000 ballots were transferred from the county to Runbeck on election night — although Runbeck said the number it received was nearly 300,000.
She said Richer then used a higher figure at a news conference without providing an explanation for the difference.
The Sun Times article said: “Finally, Honey told how Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer announced after Election Day that 275,000 early ballots were dropped off that day, but two days later he revised that number up to 292,000 with no explanation. She said he claimed later that he was just providing estimates, but she pointed out that the law requires him to provide the actual count.”
In an interesting sidelight, Honey said a whistleblower said that, as “sort of a perk,” Runbeck employees could bring in their own and family members’ ballots and insert them directly into the system, without going through the county.
This hardly would seem to enhance security.
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