December 18, 2022

Fresh from a court victory granting her the right to examine a random sample of Arizona’s ballots from its skeezy midterm election, Kari Lake has managed to notch another advance in her quest to halt the obviously fraudulent election of her Democrat rival, Katie Hobbs.

According to Just The News, citing the results of a public records request from America First Legal Foundation:

Recently disclosed internal communications between top election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County in the immediate aftermath of Election Day reveal that they struggled to reconcile a discrepancy of almost 16,000 in outstanding ballot totals. 

Prior to a Maricopa County press conference with Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer on Nov. 10, Richer sent an email to Elections Director Scott Jarrett, Gates and others about a significant discrepancy between the county’s estimated remaining ballot totals and the number reported by the secretary of state’s office. 

…

“Unable to currently reconcile SOS listing with our estimates from yesterday,” Richer wrote, showing that Maricopa County estimated having 392,000 ballots left to be counted, while the secretary of state’s website said there were 407,664 ballots left. 

“So there’s a 15,000 difference somewhere,” Richer said, although the discrepancy cited was closer to 16,000. 

The recorder’s office did not provide comment on the ballot discrepancy by publication deadline.

Who is Richer? It’s a significant question because Richer is nominally a Republican, who ran for the recorder’s office and won on an electoral integrity platform in 2020.

According to research by Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist, he went bad fast, illegally campaigning on government time and dime and resources on a ballot measure to prohibit voter I.D., a very strange thing for an electoral integrity guy, as well as this list of horrible stuff:

Upon election to the county recorder seat, however, Richer abruptly and completely rejected his previous rhetoric and claims, even defending the integrity of Fontes, the man he said was so important to defeat. He now uses his perch as an opportunity to regularly defend the Democrat-run 2020 election in Maricopa County, write op-eds at CNN against the type of election audits he conducted to gain power, draft lengthy screeds lambasting Republican leaders and voters for their election integrity concerns, and push ranked-choice voting and other efforts critics say are disastrous for voter confidence in elections.

He even set up a Democrat-funded political action committee to support Arizona candidates who share his views, a move strongly rejected as unethical by ethical election officials. The Republican National Committee and Republican Party of Arizona just sued him for packing polls with Democrat workers and seeking to bury the paper trail.

He sounds like a nightmare. So it’s interesting that he discovered a ballot discrepancy, and now is keeping quiet about it, not answering any questions from JustTheNews. 

What it suggests is that maybe he wasn’t in on the shenanigans Katie Hobbs and her Democrats were playing as they rigged their election. Perhaps he was not let in on the game plan about the extra ballots because they errantly assumed that he was a Republican who couldn’t be trusted, or perhaps was too dumb to be trusted with what they were up to. When he noticed the discrepancy and didn’t have any other information or marching orders, he asked inconvenient questions. 

For Democrats, that was fine and dandy, except that the documents about it got released in a Freedom of Information Act inquiry they never expected. 

What else could be going on here? Obviously, somebody knows the answer as to why there were nearly 16,000 more ballots than estimated ballots to be counted, and they aren’t saying anything. Weeks may pass and they may cook up some explanation, but if this were an honest operation, the answer would be right out there now, with no need for an FOIA query and unanswered calls for explanations to shake it out of them. Something is going on and those nearly 16,000 ballots need to be explained somehow.