After the Arizona Supreme Court remanded Kari Lake’s election contest back to the trial court to reconsider the signature verification problems and began considering sanctions against her, Lake responded with a new pleading. Lake filed a Petitioner’s Opposition to Motion for Sanctions and Cross-Motion for a Procedural Order for Leave to File a Motion for Reconsideration of the Denial of her Petition for Review on Wednesday in the Arizona Supreme Court.
Lake told The Arizona Sun Times, “We took the sanctions briefing ordered by the AZ SCT and flipped it into a request for reconsideration of the 35K ballot injection issue at Runbeck.” Lake said in her response that she wanted the court to consider the filing a “motion for reconsideration of the Court’s denial of review on this chain-of-custody issue.”
She was referring to her claim that 35,563 early ballots showed up at Maricopa County’s third-party ballot processing company, Runbeck Election Systems.
Katie Hobbs and Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes filed motions asking that Lake be sanctioned for alleging in her brief “the undisputed fact that 35,563 unaccounted for ballots were added to the total of ballots at a third party processing facility.”
The Arizona Supreme Court appeared to disagree with Lake on the claim, stating in their opinion last month, “The record does not reflect that 35,563 unaccounted ballots were added to the total count.”
Citing Arizona case law, Lake’s pleading went over the requirements for awarding sanctions, including “for which there is no “colorable legal argument … about which 2 reasonable attorneys could differ,” “a claim for an improper motive,” and “not ‘supportable by any reasonable legal theory.’”
She stated, “[T]he respondents seeking sanctions have not even attempted to show any evidence rebutting Lake’s claims regarding the 35,379 ballots for which Runbeck has no record of receiving.” Lake pointed out that unlike government officials, private entities like Runbeck are not entitled to “a presumption that they acted in good faith.”
Lake laid out the problems discovered, revealing a lack of chain of custody for the 35,563 “early ballots injected into the election at Runbeck.”
She observed, “Proper chain of custody would allow Maricopa to detect even one inserted ballot.”
Lake said, “That injection went undetected because Maricopa violated mandatory chain-of-custody requirements.” Violating chain of custody is a class 2 misdemeanor under Arizona law.
There was no record of delivery by Runbeck for those ballots, Lake said. She noted that Hobbs “cited two unique types of Maricopa chain-of-custody forms in her answering brief.” However, “the number of early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Receipt of Delivery forms dated November 8-9, 2022, totaled 263,379 ballots.” In contrast, there were “298,942 Election Day early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Scan Receipts, that is a discrepancy of 35,563 more ballots scanned than ballots received.”
Hobbs claimed that Maricopa County would know of any ballot “inserted or rejected or lost in any part of the process,” but Lake said Hobbs didn’t “cite to any other chain-of-custody forms in her answering brief that would explain the discrepancy.”
Additionally, Lake pointed out another violation of the law.
“Maricopa was required to count the number of ballots when the ballot containers were opened at MTEC on Election Day — but Maricopa admittedly disregarded that 6 mandatory requirement on Election Day ‘due to the large volume of early ballot packets dropped at polling places that day,’” she said.
Maricopa County admitted in its answering brief that it didn’t count the ballots before delivering them to MCTEC.
Lake asked the court not to uphold “the lower court’s rewriting the clear requirement mandated in the Election Procedure Manual to count and record the number ballots retrieved from each drop box when opening the secure containers in which the ballots arrive at MTEC, to allow, instead, counting ballots elsewhere, long after opening the secure containers.”
Lake noted that Hobbs nor the other parties ever requested oral argument or leave to file a sur-reply in order to refute her assertion about the inserted ballots. Hobbs accused Lake of only bringing up the inserted ballots late into the legal process in her petition for review with the Arizona Supreme Court, but Lake said that was “flatly false.”
An Arizona election attorney told The Sun Times this week that the trial court judge should consider recusing himself due to the perception of bias. He said regarding Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, “The courts rarely rule in favor of these Republican election challenges, so the fact that both the Arizona Supreme Court and the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed some of Thompson’s opinion raises a concern that Thompson may have overreached, overstepped, and some may believe that’s a sign of bias.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kari Lake” by The Kari Lake. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
