Her case had relied on a hodgepodge of claims that the election in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, was corrupted and should be invalidated. In an order Monday night, Judge Peter Thompson of Maricopa County Superior Court dismissed most of those claims and narrowed the others.
Of her initial 10 claims, Judge Thompson said Ms. Lake could bring two issues to trial. In one, she would have to prove that an election official purposely caused ballot printers in Maricopa County to malfunction in an effort to sway the election and that the results changed because of it. While acknowledging the printer problems, the county contends that no one was unable to vote as a result.
In one court filing, the county pointed out that despite 220 statements from people purporting to be voters that were provided by the Lake campaign, only three were from people who said they had not cast ballots and that none of those people had been prevented from doing so but rather had decided they didn’t want to wait or go to a different voting place.
The second issue that Ms. Lake can present at trial is an allegation that employees at a company working under a contract with the elections department added completed ballots to be counted without following proper chain-of-custody procedures, which the county disputes. Judge Thompson said in his order that Ms. Lake would have to prove an intentional lack of compliance that swayed the election.
To bring the case, Ms. Lake is relying on an assortment of people who have long been involved in unfounded election claims. Her lawyer, Kurt Olsen, works frequently for Mr. Lindell and helped bring an unsuccessful legal challenge in an effort to overturn the 2020 results.
One witness Ms. Lake plans to call, Clay Parikh, has spoken at election denial events organized by Mr. Lindell and served as an expert witness in a failed federal lawsuit, backed financially by Mr. Lindell, that Mr. Olsen brought on behalf of Ms. Lake in an effort to block the use of voting machines before the election.
In Mr. Hamadeh’s case, the candidate wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the court’s ruling was “a small step toward restoring confidence in our electoral process.”
A judge said on Tuesday that most of Mr. Hamadeh’s claims could continue. They include allegations that provisional ballots and some votes were not properly counted for various reasons in ways that might affect a small number of votes. (The county says that the claims rely on various misinterpretations or misunderstandings and that the votes were properly tallied.)
Ken Bensinger contributed reporting.
