Judge Who Dismissed Kari Lake’s Case At Center Of New Lawsuit — Here’s Why
Lawsuit claims judge failed to do his job... citing list of VERY specific examples
Supporters of Katie Hobbs may think the chaos of the election results is finally done and dusted. Maybe it is. But not if Ryan Heath has anything to say about it.
Who is Ryan Heath? He is an Arizona lawyer who claims that the judge overseeing this case did not execute his job correctly. For that reason, he is seeking a writ of mandamus. In plain English, he’s going over the judge’s head to the next court higher, with a demand that the higher court pull rank on the lower court demanding that the lower judge do his job by the book.
If Heath gets his desired outcome, the ruling favoring Hobbs over Lake will be overturned. That would, he hopes, trigger the overturning of Hobbs’ election win, awarding the win to Lake.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
How would that work? This is about the Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson wrongly setting which evidential requirement the plaintiff (Lake) would have to meet in her court challenge, claiming that the correct standard should have followed precedents from the case of Reyes v. Cuming which had certain important similarities involving signature checks.
From the Arizona Sun Times reporting:
Heath’s writ of mandamus, which is a type of lawsuit seeking to order a public official to do their job, focused on the problems with signature verification. He reviewed the minimal amount of time signature verification workers were given to compare signatures on each ballot envelope with the signatures in the system. He argued that “it was physically and mathematically impossible for them to have engaged in the statutorily mandated task of verifying signatures.”
He said it would take 30 seconds to verify a signature, but the signatures were verified at a rate of one in less than a second — 0.975 seconds.
He declared, “[I]t is physically impossible for human beings to pull off any meaningful comparison with any reasonable accuracy.”
Heath included testimony from signature verification workers who reported rejection rates in the 25 to 40 percent range. One of those workers reported that instead of curing those mismatched signatures as required by A.R.S. 16-550(A), about 90 percent of them were approved anyway. Reviewers were allowed to put stickers on ballots showing they were approved with no oversight; there was no record of who placed the sticker on them. –Arizona Sun-Times
Other key points raised by Heath include:
— The cited statute had successfully reversed an election, even after significant time had passed.
— Precedent in the relevance of the nearness of the total vote count in disenfranchisement favors Kari Lake’s case.
— Discrepancy between votes counted and the estimate of the total number of early voting ballots received on election night.
— Violations of the Equal protection clause
Will Heath overturn the result and install Kari Lake? It’s probably a long shot.
But whatever the odds might be, so long as this remains a live case, this is a non-zero number.
Source:
Arizona Sun-Times https://arizonasuntimes.com/2023/01/13/attorney-files-lawsuit-against-judge-who-dismissed-kari-lakes-election-contest/
