PHOENIX — An expert witness hired by Kari Lake’s lawyers testified Wednesday he found ballots for the general election printed with the wrong size image.
That could not have happened by accident, contended the witness, cyber security consultant Clay Parikh.
The testimony is part of Lake’s effort to show problems that occurred on Election Day in Maricopa County were an intentional act by someone. That proof is critical to her case, as Arizona does not allow elections to be overturned based on mistakes.
No evidence was offered as to who might have done that.
But Assistant Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy, in questioning Parikh, said even if ballots were printed with the wrong size, as Lake’s witness claims, it would not matter. He said the votes eventually would have been counted anyway — and that anyone who wanted to vote for Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, was not disenfranchised.
Ballots in Maricopa County, both those sent out early and those printed at voting centers, are on 20-inch paper.
Parikh, permitted by the court to examine some of the ballots, said he found a number of the sample were printed out to just 19 inches, leaving excess area along the borders. In a Twitter post, Lake said that was 48 of 113 examined ballots.
That is significant, Parikh said, because there would be no way for the tabulators, either at vote centers or at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, to read and tally them.
“Is there any way, in your opinion, for a 19-inch ballot image to be projected onto a 20-inch ballot by accident?’’ asked Lake attorney Kurt Olson.
“No, sir,’’ Parikh responded. “The settings and the configurations and the procedures that are used cannot allow that,’’ he continued. “These are not a bump up against the printer and the settings change.’’
Liddy, however, said the printer could have been placed in a “shrink to fit’’ mode.
More to the point, he suggested there is a flaw in Parikh’s contention that votes were not counted.
If a 19-inch printed ballot would not be read by tabulators, as with all unreadable ballots, just like any others with things like stray marks or tears, would be manually duplicated by election workers into a new ballot that could be scanned. Parikh confirmed he had seen only the original ballots, not the duplicates.
“Whether it’s accidental or inadvertent, if the shrink-to-fit 19-inch ballot has to be duplicated, once it’s duplicated, would it be tabulated?’’ Liddy asked.
“I’m unable to answer your question,’’ Parikh responded.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson is allowing Lake, who lost the governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, to pursue two of the 10 claims Lake made in contesting the election results.
One deals with her allegation that someone — not named by Lake — interfered with the settings on the printers located at voting centers.
That ballot-on-demand system exists because the county allows any voter to go to any site. That, in turn, requires the ability to print out a ballot exclusive to that person, with only the races for which he or she is eligible to vote.
But even if Lake can prove to Thompson that someone altered the settings, that, by itself, would not be enough for her to overturn the election results which show her losing to Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes. The judge, in a pretrial ruling, said she also would have to show that the problems with printers “resulted in identifiable lost votes’’ for Lake.
Even at that point, Thompson said, Lake also would have to prove “that these votes would have affected the outcome of the election.’’
The judge also is allowing Lake to present evidence during the two-day trial that started Wednesday on her claim that the county’s failure to follow “chain of custody’’ laws for ballots “permitted an indeterminate number of votes to be added to the official results, constituting misconduct.’’
To make that argument, her attorneys brought in Heather Honey, identified as an investigator. She said the county failed to have what she said are legally required tracking forms at every stage of the tallying procedure, starting from the early voting drop boxes, through transport to the county election offices, then to Runbeck Election Services for processing, and then back to the county.
“Failure to maintain chain of custody presents a situation where ballots could be added,’’ Honey testified. “But ballots also could be removed.’’
Honey also testified that Runbeck employees told her that they were permitted to submit early ballots from themselves and their families at the company’s offices. But she said Arizona law requires ballots to be taken only to official drop-off locations. “Runbeck is not one of them,’’ Honey said.
That relates to Lake’s claims that about 25,000 ballots were “illegally injected’’ into the system after Election Day.
Among the evidence Lake attorney Bryan Blehm cited were Twitter posts and statements by county officials the day after the election saying they had scanned and were prepared to tally more than 275,000 early ballots dropped off at polling places on Election Day. Only later did county officials peg the figure at closer to 292,000.
But Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, testified the 275,000-plus figure was an early “estimate’’ and never intended to represent the actual number eventually turned in.
Even if votes were illegally added, and even if chain-of-custody records are missing for 300,000 ballots, both of which Lake alleges, that still may not get her what she needs to overturn the election. To this point, there has been nothing introduced into evidence to show that those ballots — assuming they exist — altered the election outcome.
Also Wednesday, Olson attempted to get Robert Jarrett, the county’s co-director of elections, to admit that errors were made in estimates of how many people would turn out on Election Day. Lake’s attorney suggested that resulted in some people being kept waiting in line for more than two hours.
Lake complains some people, frustrated with the lines, simply went home without voting.
Jarrett said a few vote centers approached the two-hour figure but did not exceed it. And he said it was not like voters, finding long lines at one site, did not have other options, as the county posts information on its website about waiting time at each site.
For example, he said, when wait times approached two hours at Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, voters were told they could go to the nearby Faith Lutheran Church where wait times were about a minute.
The trial resumes Thursday morning.
See how election ballots are sorted, secured, processed and counted in Pima County after you vote.
