The original site contains a PDF of the decision: https://archive.vn/9heOD

Kari Lake lost her election contest and she will appeal.

This doesn't really surprise me, but I do like how this seems to have turned out here. I actually think there's a lot of good news here because the judgement basically ignored the defense's [Maricopa's] claims (except for one or two times). The rest of the judgement is not filled with exaggerated hyperbole about how Kari Lake is a terrorist trying to undermine democracy. Instead it's basically just saying: "Hey, you didn't meet the burden of proof". To be honest, given this decision, the entirety of the Maricopa's case seems to be based around actually trying to cover thier own ass in the public sphere, and failing to do it properly. I think this case has actually hurt their credibility much more than it would have if the case hadn't been televised. Thank fucking Christ for that!

Here's the burden that she had to get through:

The burden of proof in an election contest is on the challenger. Findley v. Sorenson, 35 Ariz. 265, 271-72 (1929). “The duty of specifying and pointing out the alleged illegal irregularities and insufficiencies is a task that should be undertaken by litigants and their counsel.” Grounds v. Lawe, 67 Ariz. 176, 189 (1948).

The election is basically valid until explicitly proven to be false by the challenger.

As for the actions of elections officials themselves, this Court must presume the good faith of their official conduct as a matter of law. Hunt, 19 Ariz. at 268. “[A]ll reasonable presumptions must favor the validity of an election.” Moore v. City of Page, 148 Ariz. 151, 155 (App. 1986). Election challengers must prove the elements of their claim by clear and convincing evidence. Cf. McClung v. Bennett, 225 Ariz. 154, 156, ¶ 7 (2010).

This is a big deal. ALL election officials are ASSUMED to be operating in good faith until explicitly proven otherwise. That's a crazy legal standard in any normal environment, but this is how bias the law is in favor in assuming the legitimacy of an election. Imagine a police corruption case where every police officer's testimony is assumed to be true until explicitly proven by the plaintiff to be false. If it's false, then you are legally required to assume it's an honest-to-goodness whoopsie-doodle until you prove malice and intent.

Uh, bit of a high burden there.

Here's the specific issues with the plaintif's arguments:

In his closing, counsel for Plaintiff argues that it “does not make sense” that Maricopa County did not know how many ballots Maricopa County had received on election night. But, at Trial, it was not Maricopa County’s burden to establish that its process or procedure was reasonable, or that it had an accurate unofficial count on Election Night. Even if the County did bear that burden, failing to carry it would not be enough to set aside election returns.

Basically acquiescing that it's not even enough for Maricopa County to even know how many votes it had at the time, or even that their Change of Custody processes were reasonable, just that they followed them.

The Court notes that Mr. Parikh also acknowledged a fact admitted by several of Plaintiff’s witnesses: that any ballot that could not be read due to BOD printer or tabulator failure could be submitted for ballot duplication and adjudication through Door 3 on the tabulators. Plaintiff’s own expert acknowledged that a ballot that was unable to be read at the vote center could be deposited by a voter, duplicated by a bipartisan board onto a readable ballot, and – in the final analysis – counted. Thus, Plaintiff’s expert on this point admitted that the voters who suffered from tabulator rejections would nevertheless have their votes counted. This, at a minimum, means that the actual impact element of Count II could not be proven. The BOD printer failures did not actually affect the results of the election.

This one was something the defense team harped on: if the ballots were put into unsecure boxes and counted by people at a different polling station, it means that the judge has to assume that the ballots were counted. Basically, Kari Lake's team would have to explicitly prove that ballots were lost before counting, or that they were counted incorrectly (which is impossible because Maricopa destroyed most of the original votes). Even given the destruction of evidence, even given the lack of secure procedures, even given the unreasonable procedures, until Kari's team can prove that a persona acted with malice, we must assume that they acted entirely in good faith. So, no dice.

Further, Mr. Baris admitted at Trial that “nobody can give a specific number” of voters who were put off from voting on Election Day. Thus, even if Plaintiff proved elements 1-3 of Count II by clear and convincing evidence, the truth of this statement alone dooms element 4. No election in Arizona has ever been set aside, no result modified, because of a statistical estimate. ... Indeed, to the extent that a range of outcomes was suggested by Mr. Baris, he suggested that – with his expected turnout increase on Election Day of 25,000-40,000 votes the outcome could be between a 2,000-vote margin for Hobbs to a 4,000-vote margin for Plaintiff. Taking Mr. Baris’s claims at face value, this does not nearly approach the degree of precision that would provide clear and convincing evidence that the result did change as a result of BOD printer failures. ... While this Court (in the absence of controlling authority) is reticent to state that statistical evidence is always insufficient as a matter of law to demonstrate a direct effect on the outcome of an election, a statistical analysis that shows that the current winner had a good chance of winning anyway is decidedly insufficient...

Again, the height of the bar is effectively insurmountable. Convincing statistical evidence is not enough, either Mr. Baris knew that exactly greater than 17,117 voters were unable to vote for Kari Lake specifically, or he did not. And since he didn't have the names and addresses of those +17,117 voters, and their corresponding testimony, then no dice.

The closest Plaintiff came to making an argument for quantifiable changes resulting from misconduct, was Ms. Marie’s Affidavit as discussed by Ms. Honey. Again, she states that Runbeck Election Services employees were permitted to introduce about 50 ballots of family members into the stream. But even this is not sufficient. Such a claim – if the Court accepted the Affidavit at face value – would constitute misconduct but would not come close to clear and convincing evidence that the election outcome was affected

So, this is a kind of horrific bit of evidence that the court is actually willing to entertain at face value by saying that 50 ballots were manually injected into Chain of Custody. Even in this case, this witness needed 17,067 additional ballots to be identified as being inappropriately added to the pile, it's not enough to beat the burden of proof required.

Okay, so yeah: "Didn't meet the burden of proof".

However, this is a burden of proof so fucking high that no normal human would honestly hold as a standard, even to your own family. This standard actually seems more strict than most criminal trials. Frankly, with a burden of proof this high, the cops who shot Daniel Shaver would have gotten off. The media was wrong when they said "Kari Lake has to identify a specific person who acted maliciously", because they actually kind of undersold the burden. She had to find dozens of specific people that explicitly fucked up the vote of at least 17,117 that would have voted for her. That is why Maricopa county thinks they can get away with both voter fraud and rampaging incompetence. However, in doing so, they've actually kind of exposed themselves (again) as being violently incompetent if not outright fraudulent. The judge isn't actually trying to act and sound like a hyper-partisan Neo-Con, possibly because of how closely surveilled the trail was, and so we don't see the partisan screeching that we saw from the PA SC in Giuliani's lawsuit, or the breathless condemnation and demands for disbarment that we saw directed at Sidney Powell.

If I were Kari Lake, I'd totally appeal this case, but not on the grounds that the burden of proof could have been met if they had a re-trail. Instead: focus on getting a retrail on different issues, the ones that were dismissed earlier. Drag this back into televised court again, and drag an entirely different set of problems, witnesses, and evidence to the forefront. Keep hammering on the suspicious behavior of the Maricopa BoE, and drive home the point of their utter incompetence as the most charitable interpretation.

It's not a legal win, but I think it's a big gain publicly against the Uniparty in the arena of public trust and confidence.

I've said it before, the correct plan here is to actually start bussing Republicans to Democratic polling stations to prevent pre-planned fraud. I don't like Ballot Harvesting, but until you make it illegal, you will probably have to do it. And (to AoV's credit), you may need to get some republicans to vote early to throw off the planned fraud.