‘It Could Not Be by Accident’
A cyber security expert who testified at Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge trial Wednesday said the ballot printer issues that occurred on Election Day last month in Maricopa County could not have been an accident.
Last week, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ordered Maricopa County to grant Lake’s lawyers access to inspect randomly selected “ballot-on-demand” printed ballots cast on Election Day, as well as pre-printed mail-in ballots sent to voters.
Lake’s official campaign account tweeted that what their team found was “48 of 113 ballots [42 percent] reviewed during our examination were 19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper.”
“This one-inch discrepancy cause chaos on Election day. Causing the mass rejection of these votes as they were attempted to be read through the tabulators.”
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48 of 113 ballots reviewed during our examination were 19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper.
This one-inch discrepancy cause chaos on Election day. Causing the mass rejection of these votes as they were attempted to be read through the tabulators.
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) December 21, 2022
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson tweeted a picture of a 20-inch ballot image on 20-inch paper side-by-side a 19-inch ballot image on the 20-inch piece of paper.
The difference between the two was how close the bar code was to the edge of the paper and the positioning of the candidates on the page.
A 20 inch ballot vs. a 19 inch ballot — pic.twitter.com/OSg5w4qu35
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 21, 2022
Will Kari Lake overturn the 2022 midterm?
At Wednesday’s trial, Lake attorney Kurt Olsen asked cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh, “Is there any way, in your opinion, for a 19-inch ballot image to be projected on a 20-inch ballot by accident?”
“No sir,” Parikh responded.
“Why not?” Olsen followed up.
“Because the settings and the configurations and the procedures that are used cannot allow that,” Parikh said.
“These are not a bump against the printer and the settings change,” he continued. “There are security configurations. I’ve reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script, which by any large organization that has to do multiple systems is the standard.”
“It takes away the human error of somebody miscoding in the instructions on the printer,” Parikh said.
“is there anyway this could have happened by accident”…pertaining to the 19 inch ballot being casted as a 20-inch ballot.
“No sir, the system would not allow that”
The system takes away human error.
So it was intentional? pic.twitter.com/z2Xlmb82P1
— Slayed Wolf (@TheBerthaR) December 21, 2022
Parikh further testified that putting a ballot configured for 19 inches on a 20-inch piece of paper would cause it to be rejected by the ballot tabulators.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer made an announcement on the morning of Election Day last month saying 20 percent of polling locations were having tabulator problems.
The county later said it was 70 sites or about one-third of them.
Lake’s campaign says the true number was 132, or 59 percent of the polling locations.
KARI LAKE TRIAL: 25+ Year Cyber Security Expert and Certified Forensic Investigator testifies under oath that based on Maricopa Election officials admitting they used wrong sizes for Ballots on Election Day that it was the cause of vote center tabulator rejection pic.twitter.com/1Hv3FKL98h
— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) December 21, 2022
Olsen also questioned Maricopa County Director of Elections Scott Jarrett if the 19-inch ballot image placed on a 20-inch piece of paper would be a failure of the election processes in the county.
Jarrett denied that happened, but conceded, “If something like that happened, which I don’t know how it would, yes it would have been a mistake.”
“Could that have also been a deliberate act?” Olsen asked.
“I don’t know if it could have been a deliberate act or not. I don’t believe that that occurred,” Jarrett said.
Director admits that if a 19 inch ballot image was put on a 20 inch paper in the 2022 general election it would be a failure of their election process.
It seems like this is going to come up in the future and he looks nervous to me. https://t.co/Sc8wW8U4NY pic.twitter.com/ZHRWer9L0D
— Gerard F Chavez ~G (@gerardfchavez) December 21, 2022
In his order allowing Lake’s case to go to trial, Thompson said that her legal team had to show that someone interfered with the settings on the printers, which would be a violation of Arizona law, and that the interference resulted in “identifiable lost votes” affecting the outcome of the election.
Lake has argued that since Republicans outvoted Democrats 3-to-1 on Election Day, what happened was large-scale voter suppression of her supporters.
The candidate told Real America’s Voice host Charlie Kirk last week, “Seventy-five percent of people voting on Election Day were voting for me. And then you basically shut down or make it impossible to vote or very difficult to vote at roughly 60 percent of the locations to vote, you’re going to cut into our lead. This is the disenfranchisement of voters in Arizona.”
In addition to printer issues, the Lake campaign has also pointed to chain of custody problems.
One of the allegations in Lake’s lawsuit is that the total number of ballots the county reported in the election increased by nearly 25,000 from Nov. 9, the day after the contest, to Nov. 11.
That number is significant because it exceeds Democrat Katie Hobbs’ approximately 17,000-vote margin of victory over Lake.
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