NEW: Arizona Judge Hands Kari Lake A Win, Does Not Dismiss Request For Ballot Signature Access

The legal contest over the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election is still ongoing. While it is an uphill climb for Kari Lake to be vindicated in the courts of law, the Arizona Republican has doggedly pursued just that route. Her patience was partly rewarded with a Superior Court judge in Maricopa County’s decision not to dismiss her legal team’s request to access ballot affidavit envelopes according to Just the News. This means that Maricopa County will have to defend its claim that the release of these records would violate privacy interests or not be in the interests of the state.

Maricopa County attempted to argue that Lake was not entitled to receive any ballot affidavit signatures under state law due to it being a voter registration record, but the judge, John Hannah, refuted this. The judge ruled in any event that the court was “not required to defer to the elections officials in how they have historically interpreted” the law. While Hannah stated that he did not agree with how election officialdom was interpreting this law, he had “no quarrel” in them doing this per se.

Hannah explained that in his view “I am not convinced that the ballot affidavit is a voter registration record…It is a record from which the election officials derive information that becomes part of the voter registration record, but that doesn’t mean the ballot affidavit itself is a voter registration record.”

This ruling means that Lake is not entirely out of the game in potentially convincing a court to address the malfeasances of the 2022 gubernatorial election in The Grand Canyon State. Lake contends that such malfeasances, such as voting machine errors occurring in at least 60 percent of voting centers stationed in predominately conservative areas in the count disenfranchised thousands of Republican voters, were meaningful enough to swing the election to her Democratic opponent. Lake has previously sworn that she would take her own case up to the United States Supreme Court if needed.

The Kari Lake War Room shared this tweet stating that the “Judge gives Kari Lake a massive court win by denying Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss her mail-in ballot signature verification request … “I’m inclined to think that there might be the need to take some evidence here” – the Judge … She has been granted access to the actual ballot signatures for verification.”

BREAKING: Judge gives Kari Lake a massive court win by denying Maricopa County's motion to dismiss her mail-in ballot signature verification request

“I’m inclined to think that there might be the need to take some evidence here,” the Judge

She has been granted access to the… pic.twitter.com/nH74T34jFY

— George (@BehizyTweets) June 29, 2023

Election challenges are not all doomed to dismissal or failure. The reader should bear in mind that it took the courts over a year to resolve the 1916 Arizona gubernatorial dispute and before they eventually found in favor of the challenger.