No smoking gun in Kari Lake's lawsuit (not even a pea shooter)

Wednesday was Kari Lake’s big day, her chance to at long last prove that the election was rigged and she was robbed of her right to be Arizona’s next governor.

This was her moment.

Yet Lake and her attorneys offered no smoking gun.  Not even a lightly used pea shooter.

Instead, the day was filled with testimony about “pandemonium” at the polls, questionable handling of early ballots and even a conspiracy theory that ballot images were printed an inch too small and thus they couldn’t be counted.

A theory that was blown to bits in just minutes, by the way.

No evidence of an election scheme

Here’s what we didn’t hear – what Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, in ordering the two-day trial, said he must hear for Lake to prevail:

• That a county elections official intentionally caused ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction on Election Day, and that enough “identifiable” votes were lost to cost her the election.

• That employees at Runbeck Election Services, the county’s ballot contractor, illegally added ballots and that the county’s failure to maintain chain of custody “was both intentional and did in fact result in a changed outcome.”

In other words, somebody had to scheme up a plan to steal the election from Kari Lake. And there has to be evidence that the plan worked.

Of that, we heard crickets.

Key facts:Behind the claims in Kari Lake's election challenge

Well, mostly crickets. We did hear from Heather Honey, a Lake investigator who also worked on the Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election. Honey testified that she was told by a Runbeck worker that employees were allowed to bring their early ballots to work and add them to the vote count. She described it as a perk of the job.

“Employees were permitted to bring their ballots from home and add them to the in-bound scan,” said Honey, who also worked on the Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election.

According to Honey, the whistleblowing employee saw 50 such ballots added to the vote count.

Lake lost to Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs by 17,117 votes.

The ballot tabulator 'bombshell' that wasn't

Honey also claimed that the county – contrary to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s testimony – didn’t maintain proper chain of custody of early ballots dropped off on the Election Day, allowing all manner of potential funny business to ensue.  She bases this upon the Runbeck whistleblower’s say-so and the fact that the county hasn’t yet turned over any Election Day chain-of-custody records to the Lake campaign.

The most bizarre claim of the day came from Clay Parikh, Lake’s Alabama-based cyber security expert. Parikh spoke in August at Mike Lindell's “Moment of Truth” summit in Springfield, Mo., a weekend conference dedicated to conspiracy theories. Lindell flew him in for the event and paid for his lodging.

He also was flown in to testify at Lake’s trial.

Parikh dropped what was supposed to be a bombshell – his assessment that the county’s printers were spitting out 19-inch ballot images onto 20-inch paper, causing the ballots to be rejected by the tabulators. Such a thing could only happen, he said, if the system was set up to allow it.

“It could not be by accident,” he testified.

It all sounded very conspiratorial, until Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy asked Parikh whether a rejected ballot would then be duplicated and run back through the tabulation machines to ensure the vote was counted.

“The duplicated ballot would be tabulated," Parikh replied. “Yes, it should be.”

It's a high bar, and Lake's not even close

Lake was evidently impressed with his testimony.

“That’s what we call a smoking gun,” her Kari Lake War Room tweeted.

That’s what I call a swing and a miss.

Lake’s attorneys spent four and a half hours presenting their case on Wednesday. They have one more hour on Thursday and one more witness: pollster Rich Baris, the self-proclaimed “People’s Pundit” whose polls aren’t included in FiveThirtyEight polling averages due either to bad methodology or poor results.

It seems Baris did an exit poll of 813 Maricopa County voters and from that concluded that anywhere from 15,603 to 29,257 of Lake’s supporters were unable to vote.

I’m guessing Judge Thompson will give that vital, scientific conclusion all of the credibility it’s due.

I’m also guessing Lake is in trouble here.

The judge has set a high bar here. Based on what has thus far been presented in court, Lake won’t reach it while standing on Mike Lindell’s shoulders.

Wearing stilts. With a pile of pillows under the warrior's feet.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake's lawsuit has no smoking gun (not even a pea shooter)