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(RepublicanWire.org) – Maricopa County Director of Elections Scott Jarrett testified Thursday at Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge that the county identified multiple locations where the wrong size image was printed on ballots on Election Day.

He further stated he was aware of some ballot printer settings being changed on Election Day.

Hours-long lines developed at many Maricopa polling places on Nov. 8 when ballot printer settings caused tabulators not to be able to read ballots.

Republican National Committee lawyer Mark Sonnenklar testified Wednesday his team of roving lawyers on Election Day found these problems happened in 132 locations.

The county says the printer issue occurred at 70 polling sites.

Given that Republicans typically vote 3-to-1 over Democrats on Election Day and the 17,000 votes separating Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs, Sonneklar testified, “There’s no question in my mind that had there not been tabulator issues at 132 vote centers, this election would have ended up with Kari Lake winning.”

The problem that the Lake legal team identified after inspecting randomly selected ballots from Election Day versus pre-printed mail-in ballots sent to voters was that a 19-inch image was printed on to 20-inch ballot paper.

The difference between the two ballots can been seen in how close the bar code was to the edge of the paper and the positioning of the candidates on the page.

These differences apparently made the tabulators unable to read the ballots.

Lake attorney Kurt Olsen asked Thursday, “Is it your testimony that the printer set changes that led to the so-called ‘shrink to fit’ issue was that done on Election Day?”

Jarrett responded, “That’s correct.”

The county elections official had previously testified that he was aware of these settings changes occurring at three locations.

On Thursday, Olsen directed Jarrett’s attention to his testimony of the previous day when the official said he was not aware of printer settings being changed on Election day to 19 inches.

Jarrett responded that he did not know the exact measurement at issue, saying a fit to print setting resulted in a “slightly smaller” image being placed on a 20-inch paper ballot.

Olsen wondered why Jarrett did not mention the fit to print issue during the previous day’s testimony.

“I wasn’t asked about that,” Jarrett responded. He added that the ballot “definition” was not set at 19 inches.

Jarrett recounted that he learned of the issue during a post-election audit a few days after Election Day. The audit showed what he called “a fit to paper issue” on ballots rejected by the tabulators and placed in so-called “Door 3” for later counting at the county’s central vote headquarters.

Jarrett said the county only identified three locations with the fit to paper issue, though again at least 70 locations, according to Maricopa, or 132, according to Lake’s legal team, had tabulator problems.

Olsen asked if the Anthem polling site was one of the places the county had identified, and Jarrett responded it was not.

In Anthem, north of Phoenix, people had waited in line approximately two hours to vote. The wait time was the same around 6 p.m.

Jarrett testified that the county did not direct the printer settings to be changed at the sites he said the printer image problems occurred.

He further stated that during the county’s ballot test printings prior to the machines being used, no fit to print issues were identified at any of the sites.

But when Olsen asked how Jarrett knew there were no issues, his response was no one reported any back.

“They never identified it during any of the set-ups,” Jarret said.

(RepublicanWire.org) – A judge on Monday dismissed part of a lawsuit filed by Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, but will allow her to call witnesses in an attempt to prove that she lost because of misconduct by election officials.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson dismissed eight of the 10 claims Lake raised in her lawsuit, which asks the judge to either declare her the winner or hold another election in the county. Thompson took no position on the merits of Lake’s two surviving claims, but he wrote that the law allows her to make her case.

Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes out of 2.6 million cast. She will attempt to prove in a two-day hearing scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday that ballot printers malfunctioned in Maricopa County because of intentional interference by election officials and that ballots were improperly added at a county contractor that handles returned mail ballots.

A representative for Lake will be allowed to examine 150 ballots on Tuesday.

“Buckle up, America. This is far from over,” Lake wrote on Twitter after the ruling.

She faces the extremely high bar of proving not only that misconduct occurred but that it affected the outcome of her race. Thompson will make a final decision, which will likely be appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Thompson said the defendants in the case dispute the lack of compliance with chain of custody laws and claim that Lake has misunderstood the forms required. Thompson said, as presented, whether the county complied with its own manual and applicable statutes is a dispute of fact rather than one of law. 

The judge dismissed a variety of constitutional claims, including Lake’s allegation that Hobbs, in her capacity as secretary of state, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer engaged in censorship by flagging social media posts with election misinformation for possible removal by Twitter.

Lake has zeroed in on problems with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County, home to more than 60 percent of voters. The defective printers produced ballots that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators at polling places. Lines backed up in some areas amid the confusion.

(RepublicanWire.org) – GOP gubernatorial candidate in Arizona Kari Lake went on CBS’ Face the Nation to tell President Joe Biden time is up and he has failed at the border. She said she will form a compact with other states to enforce the border laws if Biden will not.

Major Garrett started by saying, “your website is detailed and specific on the question of immigration and border security. You call, if elected as governor, for Arizona to join other states to form what you call a compact to carry out border security separate from the federal government, including arrest and detention. For the benefit of Arizona voters, can you explain the legal and practical application of this approach?”

Lake expalined, “well, of course, if you know the Constitution, you know that Article 4, Section 4 calls for the federal government to protect us from invasion, and under Joe Biden’s lack of leadership, we just aren’t seeing that. And we have an invasion at our border, the cartels, these Narco terrorist groups have operational control.

And they’re using Arizona to smuggle people, to traffic children and to traffic the most dangerous drug we’ve ever seen, fentanyl. 

And so we’re going to invoke our Article One, Section 10, basically, authority to take care of our own border and protect our own border. It’s right there in black and white in the Constitution.

And we meet all three criteria, we have an invasion, our people are in imminent danger, and time is of the essence. There’s no time for delay.

So we’re going to have other states offer help. I’ve already got a couple other governors who are willing to help out.

And I know that if you ask people in other states that are not border states, they deem this crisis on the border as one of the top issues facing our country–

Major Garrett said, “would Arizona?”

Lake continued, “with young people dying of fentanyl poisoning right now.”

Major Garrett asked again, “would Arizona go it alone if it didn’t get this compact agreement with other states?”

Lake answered, “yes, we will. But I believe we will get help. I’ve already talked to some other governors and they’re- they’re vowing to help us out wherever they can, because they realize that what comes into Arizona, fentanyl, people coming here illegally, children being trafficked, doesn’t stay in Arizona, it goes to all 50 states. And I just spoke last week to a mother and father who lost their son. And it’s just tragic. We’re losing more people to fentanyl in Arizona, since Joe Biden took office than we lost in 9/11 or during COVID.”

(RepublicanWire.org) – Arizona officials have decided that they are done waiting on the federal government to fill the gaps left in the unfinished border wall. On Friday, Arizona started placing shipping containers to block off the three remaining gaps along the border in Yuma.

“The federal government has committed to doing this, but we cannot wait for their action,” said Katie Ratlief, Governor Doug Ducey’s deputy chief of staff.

To block off the remaining border sections, Arizona is using shipping containers stacked on top of one another. The containers are 60 feet wide and 9 feet high. At the top of the containers, officials plan to place razor wire, Ratlief reported.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security declared that former President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy would be coming to an end. The policy required illegal immigrants to remain in Mexico while waiting for their hearing dates in the United States.

In 2018, when the policy was announced, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen said the program would help regain control of the illegal immigration crisis. “Aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, where many skip their court dates. Instead, they will wait for an immigration court decision while they are in Mexico. ‘Catch and release’ will be replaced with ‘catch and return.’”

The Biden administration’s DHS stated that the policy would be terminated this week because it “has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border.”

Annie Foster, Ducey’s top lawyer, stated that the program was not correctly implemented, and thousands of migrants never returned to Mexico. She stated, “Bottom line is that the federal government has a duty to protect the states — that’s part of the contract, that’s part of the constitution. They failed to do that.”

The end to the policy prompted Arizona officials to act. Ducey plans to use the remaining $6 million left over from the canceled program to add virtual and physical fencing to the border gaps.

The state does not currently have permission from the federal government to block off the wall. However, officials believe the remaining 3,000 feet can be filled within days.

Foster said, “At this point, we are closing that gap and we’ll figure out the consequences as we move forward.”

In late July, the Biden administration authorized the completion of the border wall near Yuma. The administration cited that filling the gaps would protect immigrants from injuring themselves by slipping down a slope or drowning in the river.

Arizona officials reported that they had not seen any attempts made by the federal government to move forward on the promised plans to close the gaps.

(RepublicanWire.org) – Kari Lake is a republican running for governor in Arizona, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump.

Trafalgar Group has her currently up by 12 points.

On Thursday, she may have just added to her lead, when she was confronted by a CNN reporter. Lake’s response was just brutally honest.

Reporter Kyung Lah from CNN was trying to get Lake to answer some questions, when Lake turned the tables on her, which left Lah speechless.

Lake referenced CNN+ — the streaming service that CNN invested a ton of money that was canceled just weeks after it launched as it failed to pull in viewers. “I’ll do an interview with you… as long as it airs on CNN+, does that still exist?” Lake said. You could see the look on Lah’s face when Lake said that, it was priceless. “I didn’t think so because the people don’t like what you guys are peddling which is propaganda. Thank you.”

There’s no doubt that this will help Lake out with the base who want to see Republicans who are willing to fight back and not go along to get along.

(RepublicanWire.org) – Can Mark Kelly run for re-election as a flinty independent in Arizona? As Politico reports, that’s the emerging strategy for the Senate Democrat, but it’s almost certainly too little and too late. After sixteen months of sucking up to progressives and even throwing his colleague Kyrsten Sinema under a bus or two along the way, the stench of Joe Biden won’t easily evaporate around Kelly’s re-elect bid:

The Arizona Democratic senator is breaking palpably with the president as he pursues a full six-year term this fall in a once-reliable red state that’s recently become fertile territory for Democrats. Though Kelly has at times sought distance from the president on the border and economic issues during his 16 months in Congress, his recent run of schisms with the White House demonstrates that it’s not just Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) calling her own shots in the Copper State.

Though Democrats are used to Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) bucking them, Kelly’s vote against David Weil to be wage administrator for the Labor Department shocked party leaders, according to one Democratic senator supportive of the nomination. And his criticism of Biden’s approach to the southern border only grew louder after the White House reversed the Trump administration public-health order known as Title 42, potentially clearing the way for more immigrants seeking asylum to enter the country.

“I tell them when I think they’re not getting stuff right, like in this case. There’s no plan,” Kelly said in an interview, referring to the Title 42 rollback.

There hasn’t been much polling done in Arizona, and nothing at all for months oddly, but what little there has been doesn’t look promising for Kelly. Republicans have a primary fight that AG Mark Brnovich appears to be leading comfortably so far despite worries among the base that he might not be conservative/populist enough for the GOP at the moment. Brnovich’s history as a former John McCain aide might not win him a lot of favor in the GOP primary, but Brnovich would likely make lots of reference to it in a general election in a state where McCain still remains a well-like figure.

Kelly, however, didn’t get above 46% in head-to-head polling against Brnovich last year. In fact, he didn’t get above 44% in head-to-head polling against any of the GOP’s primary candidates either. His incumbency didn’t do Kelly any favors even when Joe Biden’s job approval numbers looked considerably better than they do now.

Of course, those public polls were taken months ago. We can however assume, based on Kelly’s recent attempts to escape the Biden stench, that his internal polling hasn’t shown any improvement. He’s trying to distance himself so much now that Politico has taken notice of it, and that spells doom for Biden’s attempts to push his progressive Build Back Better agenda under new branding in the next few weeks.

It probably spells doom for Democrats in 2022 and 2024, too. This kind of abandonment by Kelly and other endangered Democrats will make Biden either pull a Clintonesque triangulation or more likely end up a lame duck in the second year of his presidency. The GOP is almost certain to take control of the House anyway, and Kelly’s rebranding shows that Chuck Schumer should be worried about ending up as Senate Minority Leader again. Republicans have a 3.5-point lead on the generic congressional ballot in the RCP aggregation, a red-wave lead that they haven’t relinquished in five months.

Kelly’s trying to get ahead of the tsunami, but his belated embrace of the middle is almost certainly not going to fool Arizona voters. Kelly tied himself to Biden and the progressive agenda when even Sinema resisted it, and that’s a track record that won’t get erased by Kelly’s sudden Biden remorse. 

(RepublicanWire.org) – Democrats face major losses in the upcoming midterms. Their only solution? Trying to pass a set of radical election bills that would make elections “free and fair”— i.e. make stopping voter fraud impossible.

Thankfully, that scheme failed. More than that, states are working overtime to ensure elections aren’t hijacked by cheaters.

Over the last year, numerous states passed laws to safeguard their elections. Democrats rioted, claiming basic measures were the same as “voter suppression.” Well, Democrats and Biden are going to be even more upset, when they learn what just happened in Arizona.

From The Epoch Times:

“A Republican majority of the Arizona Senate Committee on Government passed a slew of election integrity measures on Jan. 24, that they say will ensure future elections are secure and legal…

SB1120, which was approved on a 4–3 vote, would implement currency-grade ballot countermeasures to safeguard against fraud or forgery of ballots.”

Republicans in Arizona’s state Senate passed a variety of bills to prevent fraud and secure future elections. One of the measures would require ballots to have a “secure holographic foil” that would be hard to counterfeit—much like American currency. The goal, according to lawmakers, is to make it easier to vote, but harder to cheat.

Measures like this have been passed in numerous states since the 2020 Elections. Yet Democrats are outraged. They claim Republican majorities in these states are passing laws that make it harder for Americans to vote, particularly minorities. Joe Biden even said Georgia’s new laws are “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Yet nothing passed by state Republicans over the last year do anything to discourage Americans from voting. In fact, in some of these states, they expanded early voting to ensure more people can lawfully vote. The only people who should be upset with the new laws are those who want to vote without ID, want to forge ballots, or want to vote as someone else.

Now, who would want to do all that?

It’s pretty suspect that Democrats are opposed to common-sense measures to secure our elections. There is no reason why we can’t take steps to ensure that only registered voters can participate in our elections. A lack of voter integrity laws opens the door to all kinds of fraud, much like an open border allows all kinds of criminals to flood the country.

I guess Democrats aren’t that interested in security, except for securing their mansions?


Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has signed a new bill into law that is designed to protect his citizens’ gun ownership rights. With the Biden administration clearly working to outlaw guns entirely, Arizona lawmakers felt that something needed to be done to protect people. And thus, the Second Amendment Freedom Act was born.

Gun ownership is a constitutional right, but Democrats have made it clear that — in the words of Joe Biden — “No amendment is absolute.” Unlike most laws, the Second Amendment Freedom Act doesn’t actually establish any new guidelines, except for one — a refusal to comply with Biden’s effort to strip Americans of gun ownership. Ducey calls the law “a proactive law for what is possible to come out of the Biden administration.”

“If the federal government does anything that tries to infringe on our Second Amendment in the state of Arizona, we’re not going to comply,” says State Rep. Leo Biasiucci, who sponsored the bill. 

“There’s a lot of discussion out of Washington, D. C., about congressional action around the Second Amendment, and this law was simply to protect the rights that we already enjoy in Arizona,” Ducey told KTAR-FM. He signed the bill just days before Biden’s massive gun control executive order.

“We’re gonna protect Second Amendment rights in Arizona,” Ducey says. “Whatever [Biden] does, it likely won’t do anything to solve these mass shootings that we’ve had.”

Biden calls it “bizarre” to suggest that taking guns from Americans is “contrary to the Constitution.” But outside of blue clusters in Real America, we see plain as day what Biden and Democrats are trying to do.