On December 9, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed an election contest complaint against Secretary of State and Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs and various Maricopa County officials, alleging that the 2022 general election in the county was fraudulent for a host of reasons, and demanding either that the election be redone or that Kari Lake be installed as the rightful governor of Arizona.

Once the lawsuit was filed, Lake; her lawyer, election denier Kurt Olsen (who was just sanctioned for false claims in a different election lawsuit on Lake’s behalf); War Room host Steve Bannon; and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft immediately launched an effort to promote the complaint and twist its evidence to say it proves more than it does. In actuality, the 70-page lawsuit requires readers to extrapolate most of its accusations based on flimsy evidence from the 2020 election and thus assumed to be true of 2022. 

Generally, these figures erroneously claim that the complaint provides proof that that nearly 130,000 ballots have unverified or unverifiable signatures, that nearly 300,000 illegal votes were cast in Maricopa, that 72% of voters agree there was election interference in the county, and that 59% of the voting machines were down in Maricopa County.

Here are their claims and the facts that counter them:

Claim: Signature verification did not happen in Maricopa County

Hoft claimed on December 10 that in the lawsuit, “they speak about mail-in ballot signatures, and they include some examples in the filing, which is basically just scribble.” According to Hoft, this means “there's basically no signature validation going on in Arizona.”

On December 12, Lake said, “We believe more than 130,000 votes possibly have terrible voter verification and shouldn’t have been counted. We have whistleblowers who were part of that signature verification who said everyday, they were churning out tens of thousands of ballots that should not have even been in the system. They had fake or no signatures or scribbles, but they were somehow pushed through by somebody in the verification process.”

In an interview with the Gateway Pundit published December 12, Olsen said, “We have actual ballot — the ballot signature images — and the control signatures that are used to validate those signatures.” He claimed that this visual evidence was very strong and presented a hypothetical: “If I am to say to you that we have, you know, 100,000 ballot envelope images, and of that, 17,000 we can show that the signatures are a complete mismatch.” 

Olsen claimed that they have identified “tens of thousands of mismatched signatures from 2020. We have whistleblowers from MTEC doing signature verification in 2020, who say the same thing is happening in 2022,” referring to the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. He added: “Either the signatures that are on file with the state as the control group are fake, or the ones on the ballots, the ballot envelopes are. There’s no in between — the mismatch is so stark.”

Olsen also appeared on War Room to defend the lawsuit, arguing that articles pointing out weaknesses in the lawsuit are “gaslighting” people in order “to keep people from looking, themselves, at the evidence,” particularly on the signature verification issue: “We put an image of the two signatures side by side. There are tens of thousands of those.”

Reality: The lawsuit includes only one example of a “scribbled” signature 

The lawsuit includes only one example of an allegedly mismatched signature, and it is an example from 2020. It uses this to claim that “tens of thousands of ballots with signature mismatches” were allowed in 2020, and extrapolates this to mean “they did the same thing with the 2022 general election.” 

This allegation is furthered by more claims that ballots with unverifiable signatures were accepted in the 2020 general election. The lawsuit says this also must have happened in 2022, noting that some of the same people with questionable signatures from 2020 also voted in 2022. 

The lawsuit also cites statements from multiple election workers from Maricopa County claiming that in the 2022 general election, they and their co-workers did not reject as many ballots as they expected to, and the “most likely explanation” was that “the level 2 managers who re-reviewed the rejections of level 1 workers were reversing and approving signatures that the level 1 workers excepted and rejected.” 

Outside of an assumed example from 2020 and three Maricopa County election workers saying they did not have as many mismatched signatures as they expected to have, the lawsuit shows no actual evidence that it happened in 2022. As far as one can tell from the lawsuit itself, there are not “tens of thousands” of examples, as Lake’s team would have people believe.

Lake herself admitted on War Room that they don’t have the evidence they claim to; the lawsuit was filed, in part, to get access to it: “We’re looking for relief. We want to take a look at all of the ballots, not the ballots, but the signatures on the envelopes, to compare how many were actually matching. We’d like to take a look at those, and look at the ballots.” 

Claim: 300,000 illegal votes were cast in Maricopa County 

Lake and her supporters tend to cite this claim as the strongest evidence of fraud in Maricopa. They argue that chain of custody documents, which help track mail-in ballots, were not filled out for nearly 300,000 ballots collected from dropboxes on Election Day, meaning that all 300,000 were illegal and should not have been counted. 

Kari Lake said plainly on December 12, “We believe there were hundreds of thousands of illegal votes counted and we believe our lawsuit proves it.” Later on, she added they “threw in about 300,000 ballots with no chain of custody; those are illegal ballots. We have no way to prove where they came from, whose they are.” 

Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of the right-wing organization Star News, said on December 10’s War Room that the claim that “they don’t have chain of custody for 298,000 early votes” on Election Day alone gives the judge “a strong legal reason to grant the remedy,” though he admitted he had not “seen the exhibits that show that.”

Hoft added that the lawsuit alleged “hundreds of thousands, they said, of illegal ballots, and they're going to prove that in court.” 

Olsen said that “there were over 300,000 ballots that don’t have proper chain of security,” which he said means that “there’s no way to tell where those ballots came from.”

Reality: They call all mail-in ballots collected on Election Day “illegal” 

Lake’s supporters neglect to mention that they’re referring to all ballots that were collected from dropboxes in Maricopa County on Election Day when they cite the 300,000 figure. They allege, in part, that there must be no chain of custody forms tracking them because their team is personally unable to find them. 

Claim: 72% of Democrats and Republicans agree that there was election interference in Maricopa County 

On December 10, Hoft said that the lawsuit “opened with the fact that 72% of Democrats and Republicans believe that people were deprived of their right to vote that day” and that voters “understand that there was election interference involved.” 

Two days later, Bannon said to Lake, “You know, 72% of the people think that something went on here.” 

Reality: The poll they reference is described in the complaint is a poll of “likely U.S. voters,” but the lawsuit text gives no indication of party affiliation. 

The poll itself is from right-wing polling group Rasmussen Reports, which surveyed 750 individuals nationwide on whether they agreed with the following Kari Lake statement about Arizona: “This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. This is about our sacred right to vote, a right that many voters were, sadly, deprived of on November 8th.” There was no mention of “election interference” in any of the questions asked. 

Claim: 59% of voting machines were down in Maricopa County 

According to Hoft, the lawsuit claimed that “59% of the machines” in the county “were not operating that day.” With this established, Hoft asked, “At what point is the election null and void? Is it 40%? Is it 50%? Or do you have to wait until there's 80% of the machines that aren't working? I mean, at what point, how much abuse are we going to take as Republicans and allow this to continue?”

Reality: The lawsuit alleges “widespread tabulator or printer failures at 59% of the 223 vote centers,” not 59% of the machines.

Further, this argument contends that “there were rampant breakdowns at no less than 132” voting centers, rather than the approximately 70 that Maricopa County officials identified. It is supported, in part, by statements in supplementary court documents from the members of the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity Team, who allege that “Republican poll observer[s]” told them that there had been tabulator issues at their voting site. Many of these statements are not firsthand accounts.

After explaining the allegations in the lawsuit, Lake laundered her image to the War Room audience, implying that the relief they’re seeking is simply for the election to be “set aside or thrown out or redone.” Not once does she state that they ask for her to be unquestionably installed into the governorship via “an order setting aside the certified result of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and declaring that Kari Lake is the winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.” 

This lawsuit relies on a preset acceptance of election denialism and a willingness to accept extraordinary assumptions based on distrust in the current election system. Without these preconceptions, it reads as a flimsy, unsubstantiated mash-up of coincidences and unverified suspicions twisted to declare Lake the rightful governor of Arizona because she did not expect to lose. As such, her supporters must go on right-wing media to push their efforts and lie ever so slightly about the contents of so as to not reveal that it is all a bluff.