With the Kari Lake lawsuit still ongoing, Monday’s Arizona State Senate hearing on the 2022 election substantiated the importance of Lake’s fight to restore the integrity of elections in Arizona. Shelby Busch with We the People AZ Alliance brought the receipts with her presentation about Maricopa County’s broken signature verification system. Busch alleges little has been fixed since 2020 in the state’s elections concerning the important signature verification process. Senator Wendy Rogers, Chair of the Senate Election Committee, was attentive and gave Busch the time needed to illustrate her material findings adequately. In Tuesday’s interview below, Kari Lake told Joe Pagiliano, “This is serious stuff and resulted in about half a million votes being counted that shouldn’t have been counted.”
.@KariLake: “Close to 150,000 ballots were counted that did not meet the signature verification requirements. This is serious stuff. Why were they counted?” pic.twitter.com/qzogXyoeE5
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) January 24, 2023
Busch and her team investigated and supplied significant evidence collected during her investigation for the Maricopa Forensic Audit in 2021. She and her colleagues allegedly found ample evidence of fraud and procedural malfeasance in the 2020 election. Busch contends Maricopa County failed in 2020 to follow EAC standards. Moreover, Busch says, “those failures continue to this day.” Busch said that “10 percent of the signatures” her team reviewed for the 2020 and 2022 elections fell in the “egregious” category.
Attempting to remain unbiased, “We trained our workers to pass a ballot, not to look for a reason not to pass a ballot. Every one [of the ballot envelopes] that fell into this egregious category we believe has zero capability of meeting any of the Secretary of State standards,” said Busch.
🚨Signature Verification🚨
“What was most concerning to us overall was that 10% of the signatures that were reviewed fall into what we consider an “egregious” category.”
Meaning these signatures fail multiple points & cannot pass.
They were passed anyway & added to the count. pic.twitter.com/j0kx9TGdcH
— Kari Lake War Room (@KariLakeWarRoom) January 23, 2023
Busch wants Arizonans to understand that the continued problems with signature verification have a lot to do with the County’s “failure to properly fund and staff” the signature verification process. The implications of her statement are profound. “Signature verification in the 2020 election, the system was never repaired,” said Busch. Busch also told UncoverDC there is “no way the county will ever be able to do it properly” if the County continues to “under-resource” the critical process of signature verification.
Notably, her team was powered by about 150 individuals who put in about 5700 combined work hours to verify the ballot image signatures. Busch says her “ultimate overall goal is to help people understand that signature verification is just a terrible way to identify a human being” for something as important as an election.
(…) Her report allegedly proves that 420,987 of the 2020 ballot envelopes failed signature verification, leaving that election “openly vulnerable to fraud.” According to Busch, that means there were allegedly approximately 40,000 ballot envelope signatures, or 10 percent, that was “illegally counted” in the 2020 election. AZ Alliance arrived at their numbers by reviewing “one-quarter of the 1.9 million envelopes from the 2020 election using 150 trained workers who studied the SOS manual, following the guidelines when they analyzed the ballot images from each voter record individually. Once we got the statistics for that first 25 percent or 400,000 ballots, then it was extrapolated to determine that number.” Busch emphasized multiple times that nothing about the process has changed— therefore leaving the 2022 election “equally vulnerable.”
🚨 BOMBSHELL DISCOVERY 🚨
Today’s Senate Testimony CONFIRMS nearly 40,000 ballots illegally counted (10% of the signatures reviewed).
I think all the “Election Deniers” out there deserve an apology. pic.twitter.com/3g2x5zgd2c
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) January 23, 2023
Busch provided a summary sheet (Exhibit 3) for a quick overview of her group’s signature verification findings for the 2022 election from ballot envelope images reviewed since the team began their work about 45 days ago. She explained the exhibit represents “the overall assessment of our findings when we evaluated our 380,976 ballots and the various types of issues that we located; the violations that we found, and the statute of each violation and the number of each type of violation.” She then described in detail for the remainder of her presentation the many types of invalid signatures found during the investigation. Those included but were not limited to blank envelopes, scribbles, mismatched signatures, failed SOS standards, and more. There were 181,378 potential bad signatures, far more than the margin of Hobb’s lead in the gubernatorial election. (Read more: UncoverDC, 1/24/2023) (Archive)