Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s legal team called several experts to testify in her election lawsuit trial.
Among the group of experts was professional investigator Heather Honey who shared statements that she received from multiple citizens of Maricopa County who claim that the county failed to follow legal requirements set for the dropbox chain of custody.
“One of the areas that we looked at,” Honey said, “was the dropbox chain of custody, and the election procedure manual specifically has guidelines, … about eight specific requirements that the recorder is required to do.”
She remarked in the testimony that in their research, she and her team spoke with people who participated in the process, including an employee from Runbeck, a third-party election services company that operated in Maricopa County.
“The Runbeck employee, Denise, did she tell you about any problems at Runbeck with respect to chain of custody?” Lake’s lawyer Bryan Blehm asked Honey.
“Yes,” Honey responded. “She expressed her concern over the fact that the procedure that had been well established during the election had not been used for the large number of election day dropbox ballots that were received.”
Honey further remarked that she spoke with a woman named Leslie, who volunteered as an observer at the Maricopa County Tabulation Election Center (MCTEC) on election night when ballots were received back from the drop boxes.
“Her concern,” Honey explained, “was that specifically the seals were being removed from the transport containers, and the ballots inside were not counted. That was a requirement, as she understood it, and the fact that they were just taking those ballots out of the transport containers without counting them was her primary concern.”
“So we have two different people,” Blehm reiterated, “and both of them are both telling you that there was no chain of custody on election day for ballots being transported from MCTEC to Runbeck?”
“Correct,” Honey responded. “They weren’t following the legal requirements for chain of custody. There were seals on the containers when they transported them, but the specific issues were that they were just cutting them open, taking the ballots out, putting them in trays without regard to how many; there was no documentation.”
🚨 Chain of custody expert on BOTH Runbeck and Maricopa County: "They weren't following the legal requirements for chain of custody" pic.twitter.com/0xtjcF7EVj
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) December 21, 2022
Further in her testimony, Honey reiterated that she believed somebody somewhere along the line “failed to maintain chain of custody,” making it impossible to know “how many ballots were or were not transferred.”
In the lawsuit, the Lake campaign is alleging that “The number of illegal votes cast in Arizona’s general election on November 8, 2022 far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin,” and that “Witnesses who were present…show hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election in Maricopa County.”
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