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yan Heath, an attorney who started The Gavel Project to engage in lawfare against woke ideology, has filed suit against the judge who dismissed Kari Lake’s election lawsuit. Submitted on Monday, the writ of mandamus demands that Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson vacate his ruling and award the election to Lake.
Heath told The Arizona Sun Times he doesn’t really know where Thompson came up with the high bar he required Lake’s attorneys to prove in order to overturn the election. Thompson required showing by clear and convincing evidence that the misconduct was intentional and meant to change the election, was performed by one of the appropriate people in charge, and that it changed the election.
Heath said this was the wrong standard. He added the judge should have relied on Reyes v. Cuming, a 1997 Arizona case involving similar circumstances, where signatures on the envelopes were not compared to the voter registration list, which violated a non-technical statute.
Heath’s writ of mandamus, which is a type of lawsuit seeking to order a public official to do their job, focused on the problems with signature verification. He reviewed the minimal amount of time signature verification workers were given to compare signatures on each ballot envelope with the signatures in the system. He argued that “it was physically and mathematically impossible for them to have engaged in the statutorily mandated task of verifying signatures.”
He said it would take 30 seconds to verify a signature, but the signatures were verified at a rate of one in less than a second — 0.975 seconds.
He declared, “[I]t is physically impossible for human beings to pull off any meaningful comparison with any reasonable accuracy.”
