Kari Lake humiliated as her 'star witness' instead proves Arizona elections were secure: columnist

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake put forward a "star witness" at Wednesday's trial in which she is seeking to throw Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated her in the 2022 midterm election, out of office on grounds of supposed election fraud.

The only problem, wrote Laurie Roberts for The Arizona Republic, is that her witness actually torpedoed her case.

"Her attorney, Kurt Olsen, told the judge he’d be presenting evidence that Maricopa County didn’t verify the voter signatures on 'hundreds of thousands' of early ballots, instead hiring signature reviewers who just went through the motions while the county looked on," wrote Roberts. As proof, he called signature reviewer Jacqueline Onigkeit, who "spent more than an hour explaining the lengths to which county went to verify signatures — the weeklong training of workers, the two shifts of level one reviewers, three levels of signature review, the admonition to get it right."

"'They (supervisors) told us, ‘You need to be very cautious. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing and remember that whatever you reject or approve, you can be called in to testify,’' Onigkeit testified," said the report. "As a witness for the defense, Onigkeit was dynamite. The problem is, she was supposed to be the star witness for Lake."

Olsen also showed a video of an election worker who appeared to be rushing through ballot verifications as proof that they weren't seriously vetting the ballots — except it turned out that that worker was actually fired from the job, indicating the supervisors were in fact demanding real verification of ballots.

Lake, a one-time Phoenix news anchor backed by former President Donald Trump, has refused to concede her election loss and filed a series of lawsuits demanding that state courts nullify the results, all ending in failure. She was even referred for criminal investigation after tweeting out what appeared to be signatures of voters, which would be a violation of state law.