🚨THREAD: Last night, @KariLake filed a reply brief in her appeal. This is in response to the brief filed by Maricopa et al. You'll want to follow this thread closely.
@KariLake @KariLakeWarRoom @UncoverDC
@KariLake @KariLakeWarRoom @UncoverDC
The intro gets right to the point. Defendants are trying to hold that the trial courts standard was proper- that they needed to prove that def. INTENDED to affect the outcome. That is nowhere in case law. Case law demonstrates otherwise- a key tenet of the appeal.
Defendants purposefully conflate "Stress Testing" (which isn't found in AZ law) and "Logic and Accuracy Testing" which IS found in AZ law. Maricopa didn't perform LA testing, resulting in tens of thousands of tabulator rejections and massive disruptions on election day.
The hearing in the AZ Senate can be included; Lake is requesting the court take judicial notice (huge); the log files showed that tabulators in Maricopa rejected over 7k ballots every 30 minutes, totaling over 217k rejected ballot insertions. There were appx 248k votes cast.
Maricopa county admits in its pleadings that they didn't count ballots at MCTEC as required by law because there were so many, but there is no exception in AZ law to thwart procedure because there were too many votes.
This next part is complicated and needs some backstory. Initially, Lake brought a signature-matching claim. The judge struck it down because the defendants misled the court about what was being challenged and Defendants used laches to be able to get that dismissed. (more)
What is laches? See below. The defendants argued that Lake was challenging the POLICY used for matching, not the physical verification ITSELF, and the judge found it easy to dismiss on those grounds. But Lake wasn't challenging policy law.cornell.edu/wex/laches#:~:….
The Defense argument was " if they had a problem with this, they should've raised it BEFORE the election. They waited too long." Lake is saying, "this has nothing to do with your policy, it's that you didn't follow it and approved signatures that weren't correct"
In her appeal, @KariLake is challenging the decision to deny her claim on signature matching.
Hobbs is arguing that the appeals court MUST use the same determination of disputed facts as the trial court. That just simply isn't the case.
The Trial Court applied the wrong standard under the law by requiring clear-and-convincing evidence of INTENT. If the appeals court can't reverse, the error requires vacating the trial court's decision and remanding for further review using proper standards (AKA a retrial)
The defense case relies on the trial judge using the incorrect standard to conduct the trial, so they go to lengths to try to argue that the trial judge used the proper standard. This next section is Lake's legal argument as to why that is improper. It's important to understand.
There are two standards: clear and convincing and preponderance of the evidence. Let's unpack those quickly. Clear and convincing: (These vary between states but this is generally. Also sometimes different for elections. but here is an idea) law.cornell.edu/wex/clear_and_….
Preponderance of the evidence: As you can see, it is much different and is the default standard always used unless indicated otherwise. As you will see in the next few posts, it wasn't. law.cornell.edu/wex/prepondera….
Hobbs argues that Lake's proposed standard "bears no resemblance" to the election contest standard AZ courts use. This is just an absurd argument. Hobbs wants to rewrite the law and precedent with her appeal brief. It's ludicrous, and Lake explains why next.
A civil election challenge isn't a criminal case. This is something I have spoken about a lot. The standard the trial judge set was wrong. There wasn't even fulsome discovery, let alone enough to meet the same standard for evidence you'd need in a criminal case.
Division Two of the AZ appeals court recently reserved the question of which standard applies in cases, absent a statute declaring it, and Hobbs had claimed it was settled in her brief. It isn't, and they deferred.
And, if the legislature wants to adopt "clear and convincing" thresholds for presumptions, it does so.
And this is an EXCELLENT point-- preponderance of evidence standard applies to actions to remove officeholders. It would be strange to apply less strict review to removing officers than installing them. GREAT point.
The defendant's brief used a standard by which they claim "good faith and honesty." Lake now goes about ripping that claim apart. Maricopa knew about the defects in its equipment over 3 elections and didn't fix or report the issues. (They are being kind)
The trial court incorrectly required BOTH that officials intended to affect the election outcome AND ALSO that their actions actually did affect the results. The defendants confess that error by not defending its equation of the two.
Under the Hunt case and other cases that used that as precedent, election interference where it is impossible to "compute" the wrong, requires that results are stricken. Hobbs argues that non-quantifiable interference requires fraud. Precedent proves otherwise.
Misconduct can occur without intent to affect results: It's enough just to violate a statute, which they did. Hobbs argues mere mistakes are not misconduct, but that doesn't mean those "mistakes" didn't break the law. Why have laws?
Maricopa didn't perform L&A testing prior to the election, and in their brief, Hobbs conflates this testing with the testing required at a statewide level hoping the appellate court won't notice.
Defendants attempt to conflate "stress testing" with L&A testing, again, hoping the distinction won't be noted. Here you see that Jarett references the SOS L&A testing, which differs from the statute for testing required in the law. Crafty, but caught.
More on this:
They also downplay the severity of election day as "hiccups." They use their own self serving testimony to "prove" this and do not dispute, but just ignore, hundreds of affidavits and other evidence.
Unable to rebut the evidence describing what really happened on Election Day, Hobbs invokes her "expert." But the expert relied on data provided to him and did nothing to verify its accuracy.
They again introduce evidence from the Senate Hearing, as is allowed, that shows that 7k ballots were rejected every 30 minutes.
Hobbs attempts to distort the record in regard to Jarrett's testimony about the "Fit to paper" issue, where he perjured himself. See:
https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/status/1607865031143854080?s=20&t=G_o9g2Mq-fmIMPLhLNY8Xw
Lake argues the following: Jarrett WAS asked about the 19" ballot on 20" paper on the first day, though Hobbs argues that never happened. If the problem was with a ballot definition, every ballot would have the problem, and third, they argue all votes were counted (more)
They ignore that Parikh testified that Jarrett admitted to him during inspection that Maricopa didn't maintain dupe ballots together with originals as required by law. And we next get into the "fit to paper" shenanigans. Don't miss this next part.
They knew about to the "fit-to-paper" issue, it had occurred in THREE prior elections, and Maricopa is STILL performing a "root cause" analysis but never disclosed it to the public or to the AG.
They next break down the assault against @Peoples_Pundit . Unsurprisingly, they use FiveThirtyEight as their barometer for an "expert" but also concede that Baris has been a respected pollster for many years. I concur, bias aside. By this logic, their "experts" aren't either, BTW
Lake only had to provide that there were a sufficient number of voters disenfranchised to change the elections outcome, not that a sufficient number of voters would've voted for a particular candidate.
Almost done, folks- but it's imperative we understand the intricacies of this if we are to be able to debate and affect change moving forward. I like to think I make it a bit easier for you to do that.
Maricopa spent 12 full pages trying to get around the straighforward chain of custody requirements set forth in the law. Ballots MUST be counted when they are taken from the secure container and they MUST record this number on the form. NO EXCEPTIONS.
The law is CLEAR.
The law is CLEAR.
I have often said the more pages you need to defend yourself the less of a defense you actually have. This is *often* the case, as we see here. 12 pages on COC that they didn't follow. Pages/words in an appellate brief, or any brief, for that matter are valuable real estate.
But, unfortunately for Maricopa, they are forced to admit they broke the law, and then try to argue that the law isn't really the law, and that there are loopholes.
Wiggle words, obfuscation, leaving off the ends of citations hoping the judges don't notice-- they know they are screwed on this.
Hobbs tries to argue that the Runbeck forms are actually official Maricopa County forms. They've never been able to provide those official forms. They may not exist, because you'd think by now, they'd have come running with them.
But alas, they can't have it both ways. If they rely on Runbeck, they need to get past a serious issue. There is a 25k vote discrepancy that far exceeds the 17k that separate the candidate. So which is it, Hobbs? Runbeck COC forms, or Maricopa never created any?
There is more here. They detail why the constitutional claims were dismissed incorrectly-- a SUPER important part of this, but mostly case law, etc. Those constitutional claims are FEDERAL in nature, so those paying attention will understand why that's important.
If you would like to read this for yourself, please visit this link: scribd.com/document/62190…
There will be a hearing on 2/1. This case will almost certainly head to SCOTUS, but if you are an honest broker, it is IMPOSSIBLE to argue that there weren't horrible issues with this election that place the results completely in doubt. You just can't.
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