A lawsuit by two Republican candidates seeking to require a hand count of the 2022 election is both legally and factually flawed, a lawyer for Maricopa County is telling a federal judge. Candidates Kari Lake, running for governor, and Mark Finchem, running for secretary of state, claim counting machines are unreliable because they are subject to fraud and hacking. Those claims are based on mere allegations from states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Colorado “but not Arizona or Maricopa County,” said Emily Craiger, lawyer for Arizona’s most populous county, in a new 21-page legal filing. She told Judge John Tuchi that allegations machines are vulnerable because of “foreign manufacturing of components by hostile nations’’ are so generic as to not even merit his consideration. Craiger also pointed out that Arizona law requires various checks of counting equipment both before and after each election. There’s also a random hand count of selected races in at least 2% of the precincts to compare the tally made by volunteers from both major parties with what the machine recorded. She also told Tuchi a hand count of all ballots — nearly 2.1 million in Maricopa County alone — would be impossible. It took the firm hired by the Senate to audit the 2020 election more than three months, she pointed out, and that count was only of the presidential and U.S. senate races. “But ballots in Maricopa County seldom have fewer than 10 races in a primary,’’ Craiger said. “A general election, which includes judicial retention races, can have 60 to 70 races to count.’’
Alaska commission asks court to stop certification of U.S. House primary election, alleging failure to accommodate visually impaired voters | Iris Samuels/Anchorage Daily News
The Alaska State Commission for Human Rights is suing the lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections over what it says is a lack of sufficient accommodations for visually impaired voters in the U.S. House primary race — the state’s first all-mail election. In a complaint filed Wednesday in state Superior Court in Anchorage, plaintiff Robert Corbisier, executive director of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights, alleges that the ballots that were mailed to every registered voter in the state for the special primary election “do not provide an opportunity to visually impaired voters to vote privately, secretly and independently.” The lawsuit names Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer — who oversees elections in Alaska — and Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai as defendants. Meyer’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Division of Elections deferred comment to the Department of Law. With only three days to go until the Saturday voting deadline, the commission is asking for the certification of election results to be delayed until “visually impaired Alaska voters are given full and fair opportunity” to vote. On Wednesday, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Una Gandbhir granted a motion for expedited consideration of the request. A hearing hadn’t been scheduled as of late Wednesday, according to online court system records.