With Kari Lake's legal complaint alleging systematic signature verification failures in Maricopa County remanded by the Arizona Supreme Court to trial court, closer examination of the signature verification software used by the county reveals a strikingly low threshold for signatures to qualify as "high-confidence" matches.
Since falling about 17,000 votes short in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election to Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs, Lake has continued to contest the election results in court, arguing that there were ballot chain of custody and signature verification issues in addition to thousands of Republican voters disproportionately disenfranchised on Election Day, when voting machine errors occurred in nearly 60% of the voting centers in Maricopa County. Lake has requested that the election results be invalidated or that she be declared the winner.
Last week, the Arizona Supreme Court remanded Lake's claim alleging massive signature verification failure to the trial court, ruling that because Lake is challenging the failure to adhere to current policy rather than the policy itself, her suit was not filed too late, as the lower court had found in dismissing her case. The former candidate must "establish that 'votes [were] affected "in sufficient numbers to alter the outcome of the election"' based on a 'competent mathematical basis to conclude that the outcome would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty,'" the state's high court ruled.
