No evidence of misconduct in first day of Kari Lake election-challenge trial

The first day of an evidence trial based on an election-challenge lawsuit by Republican governor candidate Kari Lake raised plentiful suspicions but did not reveal evidence of the misconduct she alleged.

Lake, a Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump, alleges in her suit that malicious acts by election officials caused "vast numbers of illegal votes" to infect the election and that Democrat Katie Hobbs was wrongfully declared the winner.

Election results showed that Hobbs beat Lake by about 17,000 votes in the Nov. 8 election. After basing her campaign on 2020 election conspiracy theories, Lake's best chance of taking office now rests on convincing a judge she was robbed of a rightful victory.

Roughly seven hours of court proceedings on Wednesday made it clear how difficult that will be.

There's no question that Maricopa County had some problems on Election Day: Printer malfunctions caused vote-counting machines to reject some ballots at up to one-third of polling locations, causing frustration and long lines but, according to county officials, no disenfranchised voters.

Lake's two-day trial can only cover a couple of issues related to the problem, though. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson granted Lake the two-day trial based on two specific allegations in her lawsuit, tossing out eight others.

The two that survived allege that an unknown county employee interfered illegally with the printers in a way that caused Lake to lose votes. Lake also alleged that an unknown number of ballots were added to the county's total by employees of Runbeck Election Services, a Phoenix company that provides election equipment and services for the county, and that receipts of delivery were not maintained in violation of state law.

But Thompson's ruling said that Lake must prove that the county's printer malfunctions were intentionally manipulated to affect the election results and that the actions "did actually affect the outcome."

Lake's two lawyers, Bryan Blehm and Kurt Olsen, questioned Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Election Director Scott Jarrett and interviewed several witnesses, attempting to create a sense of suspicion about certain county election practices. The county's chain of custody for ballots received extra attention in the questioning. But at the end of the day, Blehm acknowledged that the evidence of actual wrongdoing didn't go much beyond "speculation."

Lake sat with her husband in the Mesa courtroom's visitor benches, which were packed with her entourage of supporters, news media members and other observers. She watched the all-day proceeding with little emotion, interacting with her phone frequently, and refused to talk to reporters during breaks.

Viewers at home could watch the hearing on a court livestream, which can be accessed at https://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/calendar/today/.

A cyber expert was among the witnesses

Some of the most compelling testimony of the day came from IT expert Clay Parikh, who alleged that someone had intentionally changed printer presets at polling centers, causing the Election Day malfunctions.

Parikh said he has been with defense firm Northrop Grumman auditing “classified systems” for three years and as a career IT security professional has worked for NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and voting systems. In response to questions by county lawyer Tom Liddy, Parikh also noted that he was being paid $250 an hour from Lake's defense fund for his testimony and that the fund also paid his airfare and lodging from his home in Alabama. He acknowledged that he had also previously spoken at an event hosted by Mike Lindell, the "Pillow Guy," who has helped Trump promote baseless claims of election fraud.

On Tuesday, Parikh inspected dozens of ballots as part of an order by Thompson to the county to make some potential evidence available to Lake's team. Parikh testified Wednesday that "red tape" securing boxes of the ballots he inspected were not adequate as security measures, and he suspected that ballots were not organized properly, seeming to lend weight to Lake's theory that the county's chain of custody was corrupt.

Parikh saw nearly 50 out of 113 "spoiled" ballots that he said had a serious flaw: They consisted of 19-inch ballot images printed on 20-inch ballot paper. The bad print job causes ballots to be rejected by the tabulators, he said, and implied this could have happened to many more ballots. He said the problem must have been intentional because it could have only happened by changing the printer adjustments or changing the setting to the app that creates the ballot style.

Liddy asked him what would happen to a ballot that a tabulator rejected because its ballot image was off-kilter. Parikh said it would be duplicated — the votes from the bad ballot transferred to the duplicate ballot — and run through the tabulator again.

Would it be counted? Liddy asked.

"If they are duplicated correctly and configured correctly, yes," Parikh said.

Though Parikh said he confirmed some ballots had mismatched ballot images printed on them, Jarrett, the election director, had previously testified that it would be a mistake if any 20-inch ballot had a 19-inch image.

But Parikh had offered no testimony alleging that mismatched-ballot images would not be duplicated and their votes counted, leaving open the idea that the problem had not caused any disenfranchised votes.

Testimony: County had sloppy chain of custody system

Heather Honey of Haystack Investigations, a Pennsylvania company that worked as a subcontractor on the Arizona Senate's partisan audit of the 2020 election, testified that the county had a sloppy chain of custody system and, referring to affidavits as part of the lawsuit's 7,000-plus pages of exhibits, how Runbeck employees allegedly could insert ballots at will into the system without a proper record. Honey is also a founder of Verity Vote, an election-security investigation company that reported in October that a Pennsylvania sent 255,000 ballots to unverified voters, a claim Pennsylvania officials dispute.

Runbeck employee Denise Marie, who's expected to testify on the trial's second day, stated in an affidavit that employee family members were allowed to turn in ballots to the company's Phoenix facility in violation of Arizona law. Honey, who had interviewed Marie as part of her review of Maricopa County's 2022 election, suggested — as the lawsuit does — that any number of unaccountable ballots could have been inserted into the system this way. She theorized that the county's failure to follow procedural rules and the law must have been purposeful.

"Somebody," she said, "made the decision not to do it."

Richer and Jarrett, in their own testimony, described the system much differently, saying that they adhered to election procedures required by law.

Brad Bentencourt, a former technical support worker for county elections, described Election Day Problems he saw at several Scottsdale polling stations. The day felt "chaotic" with printers going down and long lines of voters. Contradicting Parikh's testimony to some extent that toner wasn't the printers' problem, Bentencourt said removing toner cartridges and shaking them often seemed to work well.

Christina Ford, a lawyer with Elias Law Group for Hobbs, asked Bentencourt if he had knowledge of a plot to overturn the election.

Bentencourt seemed taken aback by the question and said he was just a worker.

The second day of the trial begins at 9 a.m. Thursday.

Reach the reporter at rstern@arizonarepublic.com or 480-276-3237. Follow him on Twitter @raystern.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: No evidence of misconduct in 1st day of Lake election-challenge trial