Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh continue to contest their election losses in the 2022 election for governor and attorney general respectively, producing ongoing new evidence of irregularities and possible wrongdoing in the election. Much of the evidence has taken months to come out, including evidence related to the problematic 2020 presidential election, due to stonewalling by Maricopa County and other government agencies at turning it over. Maricopa County mostly ignored four repeat requests for data and equipment regarding the 2020 election from Jennifer Wright, the Election Integrity Unit civil attorney for the attorney general’s office, who resigned at the end of 2022 and now represents Hamadeh in his election contest.
Much of the evidence appears to show violations of the state’s Election Procedures Manual, which are Class 2 misdemeanors. While not all of the alleged violations can be described as fraud, many of them can be characterized as alleged criminal activity. Here is a look back at some of the most serious complaints regarding alleged wrongdoing during Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 elections.
Voter signatures on ballot envelopes not matching
One of the biggest allegations in both the 2020 and 2022 elections was that voters’ signatures on their mail-in ballot envelopes did not match the signatures on record, often due to different handwriting or a completely different name. In some cases, the signature was missing altogether. In other cases, the signatures were similar to those of other voters — indicating that one person was likely fraudulently signing multiple affidavits.
State Senator Sonny Borrelli (R-Lake Havasu) put on a presentation last November regarding this problem. His team of researchers found 17,822 signature mismatches — more than the margin that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in Arizona’s presidential election, 10,457 votes. Once a ballot was accepted with the mismatched signature, the unmatching one was often allowed to replace the original signature on file. Borrelli’s team found that these mistakes with the signatures weren’t cured as required by state law by 7 p.m. on election night.
We the People AZ (WPAA) reviewed 12.12 percent of the signatures on ballot envelopes in the Maricopa County 2020 election and found that 18,022 were mismatches, evidence that was included in Lake’s lawsuit. Lake lost the election by only 17,117 votes. This translated to 156,000 likely mismatches countywide, yet the county only rejected 587 ballots for mismatched signatures. WPAA discovered that thousands of those voters voted again in the 2022 election.
Lake provided affidavits in her election challenge from Maricopa County signature reviewers who stated that they rejected signatures as mismatching up to 40 percent of the time, but when they would return to work the next day, the signatures wouldn’t be returned by their supervisors to cure; instead, they said they believed the supervisors were approving them.
In its final canvass report for the 2022 primary election, Maricopa County said it rejected 14 times more signatures than it did in the 2020 general election. This shows that far more relaxed standards were used to verify signatures in the 2020 general election.
