Kari Lake's latest Arizona election bombshell looks like (yet another) dud

BOMBSHELL alert.

Kari Lake this week dropped yet another one in her ongoing, unending challenge to the 2022 election. (Yeah, it’s still going on.)

“The sabotage was worse than we thought,” she tweeted on Thursday. “We have some bombshells to share with you …”

This particular “bombshell” — as opposed to her previous duds — involves devious Maricopa County elections officials who conducted “secret testing” of tabulators and knew, weeks before the election, that 260 of the county’s nearly 450 vote counting machines would fail.

It was a “shocking revelation,” her attorney, Kurt Olsen, told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson on Friday.

Will a judge reopen Lake's rejected claim?

Well, it’s the latest “shocking revelation” anyway — all the others having been sizably less than shocking once examined by Thompson, the Arizona Court of Appeals and the Arizona Supreme Court.

It’ll be up to Thompson whether to reopen Lake’s already rejected claim that the county’s printers were intentionally set to fail, denying her victory.

Thompson also will decide whether to hold a trial next week to determine whether the county followed the law on validating early ballot signatures.

The Supreme Court ordered him to take another look the signature verification issue, saying his previous basis for rejecting Lake's claim was incorrect.

But the BOMBSHELL is this week’s big revelation, being hyped by Lake and on right-wing “news” sites across the country.

Attorney claims the county broke the law

It comes courtesy of “new and compelling evidence” from Lake’s IT expert, who pored over tabulator logs for hours to uncover the incendiary device.

Lake is now claiming the county didn’t really test its tabulators for logic and accuracy, as required by law, on Oct. 11.

Instead, as the BOMBSHELL goes, the county secretly tested the machines on three days the following week, wherein they learned that 260 of the tabulators produced error codes when ballots were inserted.

This could only happen, Olsen told the judge, due either to malware installed on the tabulators or “some other nefarious act of remote access.”

“Not only did Maricopa officials knowingly violate the law mandating logic and accuracy testing,” Olsen wrote in his motion to reopen the matter, “but that they knew about and planned the Election Day debacle” -- one that he claims resulted in more than 8,000 ballots not being counted.

Except 'secret testing' was livestreamed

Even if that’s true — and the county says it’s not — Lake lost by 17,117 votes.

County officials called Lake’s latest claim “laughable”.

The required tabulator testing not only happened on Oct. 11, they say, but was observed and certified by state and county officials and even representatives of the state Republican and Democratic parties.

As for the so-called “secret testing” the following week, it was livestreamed.

Maricopa Deputy County Attorney Joseph La Rue told Thompson the county was installing new memory cards containing an already certified security feature designed to prevent votes from being counted twice.

A small number of ballots were then run to make sure the memory cards were installed properly and some of the ballots were spit out, usually because they weren’t inserted properly, he said.

What's next for Lake? Her signature verification dispute continues

“That’s the shocking bombshell,” he said.

One that doesn’t seem to amount to even a small firecracker, given that printer failures didn’t affect the outcome of the election.

My guess? This 'bombshell' goes pfft

But don’t take my word for it.

“Plaintiff’s own expert acknowledged that a ballot that was unable to be read at the vote center could be deposited by a voter, duplicated by a bipartisan board onto a readable ballot, and — in the final analysis — counted ... .

“It is worth repeating that ballots that could not be read by the tabulator immediately because of printer settings — or anything else — could be deposited in Door 3 of the tabulator and counted later after duplication by a bipartisan adjudication board.”

So wrote Judge Thompson, in his December ruling tossing out Lake's challenge.

We’ll know soon whether Thompson is impressed by her most recent BOMBSHELL.

Me? I’m guessing his ruling will come with a soundtrack that goes something like this:

Pffffft.

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

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake's latest election bombshell looks like another dud