Arizona Sun Times

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson heard oral arguments Friday in Kari Lake's election contest.

Thompson is considering a Motions to Dismiss filed by the defendants and a 263-page Motion for Relief from Judgment filed by Lake's attorneys urging the court to bring back her second count regarding "illegal BOD printer/tabulator configurations," which Thompson had previously dismissed.

The judge threw out Lake's lawsuit in December, but the Arizona Supreme Court ordered him to reconsider the issue of signature verification problems.

Lake's attorney Kurt Olsen told the court that new evidence produced shows there was "clear misconduct and intent."

He said, “This evidence supports our allegation that the election was rigged.”

Thompson began hearing arguments addressing the Motion for Relief from Judgment first. Olsen said the new arguments are based on receiving new evidence; the system log files and tabulator records, which were only turned over to Lake’s team within the last few months, after the trial had been conducted.

Olsen said there were four new issues since the trial took place in December. First, he said the new evidence refutes the testimony of Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett regarding problems with ballots printing. The tabulators failed to recognize many of the ballots on Election Day because they were 19-inch ballots printed on 20-inch paper. Jarrett testified at trial on the first day that this problem did not happen. On the second day of trial, he testified that it had occurred, and said the county was performing a root-cause analysis, which was ongoing. Jarrett claimed that it was determined that some techs not authorized by the county made some changes to the printer configurations on site.