Kari Lake repromotes false claims of Arizona election meddling

"New *video evidence* of Maricopa election officials illegally breaking into sealed election machines after they were tested, reprogramming memory cards, and reinstalling them," says Rogan O'Handley, a conservative commentator and influencer, in a May 28, 2023 tweet.

"Fifty-nine percent of these machines would shut down on election day in GOP areas. They've been CAUGHT."

Lake, who lost to Hobbs in the November 2022 gubernatorial contest, promoted the claims on a May 30 episode of "War Room," a web show hosted by former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

"They're breaking into the machines, reprogramming them so that they would fail on Election Day," she said of the clip shared online.

Image

Screenshot from Twitter taken May 31, 2023

Image

Screenshot from Twitter taken May 31, 2023

 

Similar allegations accumulated thousands of interactions on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to CrowdTangle, a social media insights tool.

"This is a smoking gun in Kari Lake's stolen election contest," says a May 28 article from the Gateway Pundit, a website that AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading misinformation.

Image

Screenshot from the Gateway Pundit taken May 31, 2023

The claims come after an Arizona court threw out the last count of Lake's lawsuit against Hobbs and Maricopa County, in which her lawyers alleged officials failed to properly review voters' signatures on mail-in ballots. The May 22 decision (archived here) was the final legal blow to the Republican's attempts to overturn the 2022 election result.

Lake's allegations of vote machine tampering also failed in court -- and Maricopa County officials say the clip shared online shows routine election preparation.

"The claim made in the post you sent is demonstrably false," said spokesman Jason Berry in a May 30 email. "The video shows the installation of new memory cards into the tabulator which happens in each election."

He said the cards had "previously been certified through the statutorily required logic and accuracy testing" and that the process "was conducted under the 24/7 livestream video cameras in the county's Ballot Tabulation Center."

Maricopa County also refuted claims of wrongdoing in a May 30 Twitter thread (archived here).

"If it was a secret, why did we livestream it? That's the opposite of secret," the county said.

Both Berry and the Twitter thread cited a legal document (archived here) that Maricopa County attorneys filed May 10 in response to Lake's lawsuit alleging election misconduct (archived here).

"When installing the memory cards, the county tabulated a small number of ballots on each tabulator to be certain that the memory cards had been properly inserted," the filing says. "This, too, was done under the livestream video cameras."

The attorneys clarified the process "is not logic and accuracy testing," a different collection of procedures that the US Election Assistance Commission says ensures "voting equipment function as expected and accurately count votes as marked."

After running the ballots, Berry said tabulators are "zeroed to ensure no votes were stored on the memory cards."

The tabulators are then "affixed with tamper-evident seals" and delivered to the vote centers where "poll workers perform a verification to ensure that there are not ballots recorded on the tabulator and that all results equal zero," he said.

AFP reached out to Lake for additional comment, but a response was not forthcoming.

No widespread fraud

Ballot-on-demand printers in Maricopa County did break down in some precincts on Election Day -- but not as a result of fraud, as AFP has previously reported.

The "equipment failure" occurred in 70 of 223 voting centers, according to an independent investigation of the incident (archived here). The inquiry found the size and weight of the ballots required machines to "perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained by a substantial number of printers."

Contrary to Lake's claims, the issues did not plague predominantly Republican areas, according to a Washington Post analysis -- and all affected votes were counted.

Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson on May 15 dismissed Lake's motion to revive allegations about printer malfeasance, saying the issue was "fully litigated at trial."

"This is not newly discovered evidence that goes to the claim as presented to the court in December and reviewed on appeal, it is a wholly new claim, and therefore Count II remains unrevived," Thompson said in the ruling (archived here).

The judge went on to say the "evidence presented falls far below what is needed to establish a basis for fraud."

AFP has previously debunked claims that wrongdoing affected the outcome of Arizona's gubernatorial election. None of the state's audits (archived here) -- including in Maricopa County -- found such discrepancies.

"We have seen no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was any way compromised in any race in the country," the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a November 9, 2022 statement.

Arizona certified its election results in December, making Hobbs -- Arizona's former secretary of state -- the official winner of the governor's race. She received about 17,000 more votes than Lake, according to the statewide canvass (archived here).

AFP has fact-checked other false and misleading political claims here.