Lake’s expert witness Clay Parikh examined 323 random ballots, which included 113 spoiled and duplicated ballots. 48 of them were 19″ ballot images.

This is in stark contrast to what Maricopa officials say.

“Ultimately, only 2,656 of the 16,724 ballots that couldn’t be scanned at vote centers on Election Day had to be duplicated in order to be tallied, according to county data.

Somebody is lying.

Add to that the fact that Parikh never saw the duplicated ballots, which were required by law to be kept with the ballots that couldn’t be tabulated at the precinct level, just adds to the skepticism that there wasn’t malfeasance in the election process.

https://arizona.votebeat.org/2022/12/23/23524557/arizona-kari-lake-governor-election-small-ballots

There is not much to hope for any success on appeal, given the nature of the malfeasance. I’m not a lawyer, but I wonder if they can argue the judge incorrectly threw out the signature verification process failing to follow the law. The judge ruled the claim Lake made was about the process not the application.
I’ll keep harping on this. Until a judge allows access to the envelopes and the signature verification, there isn’t any actual way to prove any particular votes were invalid.

Gouveia points to some failings of the Lake lawyer’s. Example, they never identified who was responsible for changing the printer settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrXiWJNBx08

Gouveia suggests that a lower standard of proof might help, such as “Res ipsa loquitur” (Latin: “the thing speaks for itself”) would make it easier to make a case that malfeasance throws the results into question. The problem with that is there would never be an election decided– as every election of significance would be held without a stream of legal challenges.

The only real (and this is a pipe dream) that the courts decide the very nature of mail-in ballots is so fraught with errors– intentional or not– that the process itself isn’t fair to the voters.

The issue is in the arena of public opinion, and the GOP’s efforts–or better put, their lack thereof.

We’ve seen this time, after time, after time. The response to complaints about election irregularities–not from Democrats, mind, but from Republicans–is:

“Trump lost. Get over it.”

“Lake lost. Get over it.”

“Candidate X lost. Get over it.”

And that’s it. The complaints are dismissed out of hand, without even examining what is being claimed. They are publicly and instantly assumed to be baseless conspiracy theories, formed of whole cloth from the blind allegiance of brainwashed devotees who can’t conceive of their favored candidates possibly losing.

And in so doing, these Republicans are preemptively undercutting and sabotaging any efforts they might later make to reform voting laws, because they are publicly denying that there were any problems that needed to be fixed by new legislation to begin with.

They might “show the flag” by introducing legislation, but they’re not doing anything to rally the public behind them and get the legislation passed. They’re not even trying. It’s a half-baked job, at best.

(The issue is only exacerbated because of the open hostility with which many of these Republicans have viewed these candidates. There are suspicions–well-founded, in my opinion–that they are deliberately overlooking and minimizing the problems in these elections, specifically because of which candidates were victimized. That the GOP “establishment,” for lack of a better term, is more than happy to meekly submit to a crooked loss, if it rids them of a politician they would rather not deal with.)

As the link Ray SoCa provided the issue was 19″ ballot images on 20″ paper.

The expert witness Parihka? testified he was provided 348 ballots from six voting centers. He examined 323 ballots (ran out of time). Of those 113 were spoiled or duplicated. Of those he started to testify that 48 of those were 19″ ballot images on the 20″ paper. This was objected to and that part of his testimony was stricken.

He then testified he examined 15 duplicated ballots (the originals) and 14 of them were the 19″ image and one was a torn ballot.
He testified that he examined the original, which had a ballot id, but did not examine the actual duplicated ballots. He said by law the original of a duplicate and the duplicated ballot (which both would have an id sticker on them) are to be kept together (“easily relatable”) but weren’t. He testified that a Maricopa official said it would take days to find the duplicated ballot.

He reiterated many times that the reduced ballot image could not be an accident.

Hobb’s attorney tried to drive the point home that the duplicated ballot would eventually have been tabulated, but it is interesting that Maricopa county didn’t provide that duplicated ballot for inspection.

He did say the paper jam problem was related to the 19″ ballot image– the machine would indicate a paper jam because of the reduced image size.

I listened to the testimony and thought the issue was making a ballot image designed for 20″ paper fit on 19″ paper.

The story is absolutely correct that had you used the shrink to fit setting printing a 20″ ballot image on 20″ paper wouldn’t have done anything.

And there is no way a tabulator could read a 19″ ballot image on either 19″ or 20″ paper, and the setting would have to be like print a 95% image.

I guess I’m going to need to watch the testimony again.

From an article in October, 2022 on VoteBeat Arizona website: “This year’s ballot is the longest yet, at 20 inches. In recent years, primary and general election ballots have been 18 or 19 inches.”

Was the mixup in paper length intentional, or incompetence?

To get the ballot printed on 19″ paper required using the ‘print to fit’ setting on the printer, which proportionally reduces all of the text to fit on the smaller sized paper.

The problem with that is that reduces the spacing of the registration marks on the paper that the tabulator has to see to read the ballot. The tabulator couldn’t read the ballot.

The ballots weren’t rejected, but as I understand the testimony during the trial, the ballots were copied onto a new ballot and tabulated at the Maricopa vote center.

So I think the ballots were eventually tabulated, just not at the precinct level.