There was no evidence presented to support the idea that election problems were engineered by her opponent.
After closing arguments, the judge who oversaw the short trial said that he would soon give his opinion but that it wouldn't be before 5 o'clock. He has five days to make a decision.
The Republican candidate for governor lost the election by more than 17,000 votes due to alleged rigging. Election Day problems that frustrated voters at some polling locations prompted Lake to file a lawsuit.
Officials blamed the printers that print out the ballots for the long lines after the tabulators failed to read thousands of ballots.
Key facts and additional information are available for subscribers.
Thompson allowed the trial to go on despite tossing out eight of the 10 allegations. Lake had a high bar to clear from the beginning, as Thompson said she must show that the printer malfunction was rigged to affect the election results.
The second day of hearings was dominated by testimony by Rich Baris, a conservative writer and pollster who was called to the stand by Lake's legal team to discuss his theory that Lake would have won but for the polling-site issues.
There was no evidence of wrongdoing in the first day of the election challenge trial.
According to Baris, 32% of the people who voted in the election had some sort of problem with voting. He found that 20% of the voters didn't return an exit poll.
The polling-site problems affected between 15,000 and 29,000 voters. Lake would have won if turnout had been 2.5% higher.
The outcome was impacted by it. It was large enough to make a difference.
A lawyer for Hobbs tried to impugn Baris' credibility by pointing out that his company had been banned by 538.com, which had given it an "F" rating.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Kenneth Mayer was brought in by defense lawyers to debunk Baris' theory. Baris was accused of using sleight of hand.
He is making up a lot of things.
The co-directors of the county's Elections Department were put on the witness stand to explain how ballots are transported with a secure chain of custody.
When he revealed that he knew some of the printers' problems were due to county technicians hitting a "shrink to fit" setting that made the ballots unreadable, Lake's people murmured in the visitors' benches. When asked about the problem in his previous testimony, Jarrett denied it.
Clay Parikh, an IT professional and Lake witness, testified that the printer problem could only have been caused by an improper ballot-style printer setting. The mistake could not have been an accident, according to Parikh.
The Lake witness testified that the problems were related to the t-shirt issues. All unreadable ballots would have been counted, even if there was a 19-inch ballot image in county software.
A picture of a highly secure election was painted by the two co- directors. Their testimony attempted to debunk affidavits by an election observer and employee of Runbeck Election Services that describe security violations in the voting system.
Runbeck told The Arizona Republic that they wouldn't comment on the case until it was done.
The witness who didn't testify as expected may reflect on the limitations of their own observations.
There is a new GOP election conspiracy that was started by deleted social media posts.
She said Baris' conclusions were "nonsensical" and that his own math showed the Election Day turnout would have had to increase by a whopping 16%.
The defense arguments about printer settings being arbitrarily changed by technicians don't make sense.
Lake's team put out a lot of evidence to back up their claims.
The reporter can be reached at rstern@arizonarepublic.com You can follow him on the social networking site.
The judge in the election challenge trial decided after the two day trial ended.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
