Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's lawyer, Kurt Olsen, said that Maricopa County did not have a few bad signatures on mail-in ballots in November's election, but an entire "Systemic failure." Wednesday night, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed most of the trial court's and the Arizona Court of Appeals' rulings in favor of Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County, but did remand one of Lake's claims - that signature verification laws for mail-in ballots were not followed by the county in 2022 - to the trial court for consideration.
Lake's legal filing to the Arizona Supreme Court stated that "Whistleblowers conducting signature verification at came forward with the evidence that Maricopa disregarded Arizona law and allowed tens of thousands of uncured ballots with nonmatching signatures to be counted." "Curing" ballots involves reaching out to voters whose ballots would be rejected due to errors in order to confirm the voter's identity.
"So the question really becomes who is mailing in all these votes with signatures that don't match the voter signature on file? It really goes to the heart of a critical issue for the security of mail-in voting," Olsen said to Robinson.
Shiva Ayyadurai - founder of the Election Systems Integrity Institute, who testified before the Arizona Senate in September 2021 following the Maricopa County audit - argued the problems with signature verification should have been fixed in the county after the 2020 election.
A study Ayyadurai's group released in the spring of 2022 found that the mail-in signature verification process in Maricopa County was deeply flawed during the 2020 election.
In an email to The Western Journal in March 2022, Maricopa County refuted Ayyadurai's findings, stating the signature verification process was accurate and complete in the election.
The county further said: "We responded to every allegation put forward by the Senate and its subcontractors and conclusively demonstrated that Maricopa County administered the election with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable."
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