by Matthew Holloway | Feb 28, 2025 | News
By Matthew Holloway |
A series of posts to X on Tuesday sparked a firestorm of controversy when Merissa Hamilton of Strong Communities Action-EZAZ.org made a bombshell allegation that Maricopa County Election officials were made well aware of the potential for printing and supply issues during the 2022 statewide elections. Hamilton alleged that county officials moved forward without addressing the issues, citing a series of emails detailing the Maricopa County GOP raising concerns to then-Recorder Stephen Richer and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors’ Election Manager Scott Jarrett.
The post gained national attention when it was shared by X owner and de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk.
In the initial post Hamilton wrote, “Remember in 2022 when the nearly 70% of voting centers in Maricopa County failed on Election Day causing massive, long lines and voter disenfranchisement resulting in @KariLake and @AbrahamHamadeh barely losing? Maricopa County knew in advance their Election Day plan was set up for failure, and THEY LET IT FAIL!”
Hamilton noted that the emails were obtained for Strong Communities Action by The Gavel Project and civil rights activist and Arizona election attorney Ryan Heath saying, “Without his legal muscle we wouldn’t have secured it!”
In the thread that followed, Hamilton released several emails from then-Chairwoman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee Mickie Niland to Richer and Jarrett saying, “I remember hearing from Scott (Jarrett) at some point after the primary that there was a problem during the primary with some tabulators not reading correctly due to low ink. How long does it take you to get paper or ink to them if they run out? Is there a process for the voting locations to report when they are half out of paper? How far are the restocking trucks from the voting centers? Are you using the length of the lines to help you determine when more supplies are brought to the centers?“ She also asked if there was any way she could help.
Jarrett responded, “We’ve been monitoring turnout and are prepared,” adding that there was plenty of ballot paper and normal paper to print control slips as well as “sufficient toner and printer drums.”
Hamilton explained, “Several days ahead of Election Day, the Maricopa County GOP leadership warned Maricopa County that their Election Day plan would fail and disenfranchise voters. The Maricopa County BOS Election Director Scott Jarrett insisted everything would be fine saying he was ‘confident.’”
Niland, representing the Maricopa County GOP, even followed up with an email warning, “Trust is low and voting in person is the topic everyone wants to discuss with us. To us if you are basing your decisions off of history, we think things are different now.” Niland added, “Please consider this email the official raising of that flag.”
According to an investigation of the 2022 Maricopa County Election, former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor found that “many of the Oki B432 printers were not capable of reliably printing 20-inch ballots on 100-pound paper under election-day conditions.”
McGregor added, “The combined effect of the heavy paper, longer ballot, and intermittent burst of print demand pushed the printers to perform at the very edge of or past their capability, so that any decrease in fuser performance in an individual printer could result in problems.”
Replying to the post by Musk, Hamilton thanked the X owner for “bringing attention to this vital matter!” She also raised allegations that Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas Galvin has blocked newly elected County Recorder Justin Heap from accessing “the IT staff and responsibilities assigned to him in AZ law to secure and run our elections!”
Later in the afternoon, Maricopa County published a post to X that outlined the October 2024 agreement, which demarcated the election responsibilities of the Board of Supervisors and the Recorder’s Office. Galvin shared the post as well.
Matthew Holloway is a senior reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
by Matthew Holloway | Aug 13, 2024 | News
By Matthew Holloway |
Merissa Hamilton, the Executive Director of Kari Lake’s organization Save Arizona Fund and Co-founder and CEO of Strong Communities Action, notched a victory against Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in his ongoing defamation lawsuit against Lake.
The lawsuit overall is continuing to move forward with Richer stating through his complaint that he has faced “violent vitriol and other dire consequences,” due to what he calls lies spread by Lake, according to the Associated Press. In an op-ed he wrote for the Arizona Republic, Richer said, “Rather than accept political defeat, rather than get a new job, she has sought to undermine confidence in our elections and has mobilized millions of her followers against me.”
In the course of this case, Richer’s attorneys subpoenaed Hamilton, who is not a party to the lawsuit, and compelled her compliance to provide documents for the case. According to court documentation, “Hamilton informed Plaintiff’s counsel she had copied over 100,000 documents. As was her right under A.R.S. § 12-351, Hamilton insisted on payment of reasonable costs at the time of production.” Hamilton assessed her costs to be $32,345.50.
Per A.R.S. § 12-351, ‘All reasonable costs incurred in a civil action by a witness who is not a party to the action with respect to the production of documents pursuant to a subpoena for the production of documentary evidence shall be charged against the party requesting the subpoena if the witness submits an itemized statement to the requesting party stating the reproduction and clerical costs incurred by the witness.” It also allows a witness to “demand payment of the reasonable costs simultaneously with actual delivery of the subpoenaed documents.”
Rachel Alexander of the Arizona Sun Times reported via X, “MaRICOpa(sic) County Recorder Stephen Richer just got smacked down by a left wing judge; ordered to pay Merissa Hamilton $25,345.50! And it appears she was representing herself without an attorney and still won. This was regarding him trying to drag her into his defamation lawsuit against Kari Lake.”
Hamilton corrected her noting that the judge had been changed over the summer and that the presiding judge is now “the Honorable Randall Warner[.] He’s known as being a traditional Constitutionalist judge.”
Judge Warner ruled in Hamilton’s favor that Richer must pay Hamilton $25,345.50 upon picking up the documents even if he elects not to take them, ruling that “Hamilton is not entitled to $7,000 for clerical costs both because those costs are not itemized as required by A.R.S. § 12-351(A), and because 280 hours—the equivalent of seven people working full-time for a week—is an unreasonable amount of time to spend on producing documents.”
Richer’s legal team argued that “Hamilton’s costs are unreasonable because they result from her unilateral decision to produce paper documents. Plaintiff points out that the subpoena and Rule 45 direct documents to be produced in native form and as they are kept in the usual course of business.” However, Hamilton noted that the cover letter she received with the subpoena stated, “Plaintiff was seeking ‘copies of all documents requested,’ that she could comply with it by ‘mailing or delivering the requested documents,’ and that she would be reimbursed for ‘reasonable copying expenses.’” She also pointed out that the letter failed to mention electronic production as an option and that her decision to produce the documents on paper was reasonable.
Judge Warner did concede that “Hamilton misread Plaintiff’s instructions, which any lawyer familiar with the discovery rules would understand as a request for documents in native form. This means digital documents must be produced in their original digital form. Documents stored as PDF’s must be produced as PDF’s. Word documents must be produced as Word documents. Excel files must be produced as Excel files.” However, he added “But it is easy to see how a non-lawyer endeavoring to comply with Plaintiff’s subpoena could be confused.”
In law, many attorneys believe you should never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. It seems clear that Richer didn’t know Hamilton would answer on paper.
Matthew Holloway is a senior reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
by Corinne Murdock | May 24, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
On Monday, the Maricopa County Superior Court dismissed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s case. Tuesday, Lake announced the launch of the “largest ballot chasing operation” in state history, which she clarified was a voter registration initiative for the upcoming election year.
Leading the initiative, backed financially with the Save Arizona Fund, will be longtime grassroots activist Merissa Hamilton.
Lake asserted that her team had proven “beyond a shadow of a doubt” to the Maricopa County Superior Court the brokenness of the state’s election system. However, despite her court loss, Lake pledged to continue to fight for election wins. Lake said that left-wing political actors shouldn’t be the only ones that conduct voter registration.
“We’ve got to work in this rigged, corrupt system, and we can do it,” said Lake.
Lake said that while she opposes mail-in ballots, she believes that the current election system requires participation to win. She claimed that about 500,000 Republican and independent voters combined were sent a mail-in ballot that they didn’t return.
“If this is the game we have to play, if this is their rigged system, we’ll work in their rigged system,” said Lake.
The Arizona Supreme Court granted a review of Lake’s challenge in March.
In Monday’s ruling, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson explained that Lake failed to prove that election officials engaged in misconduct that affected the results of the gubernatorial election. Thompson ruled that Lake’s presentation of evidence that the signature review process was unlawful didn’t provide certainty that a specific number of ballots were impacted by the allegedly quick review.
Thompson cited several testimonies presented by Lake’s witnesses, who reported a preference for a more hasty and thorough signature review process but admitted that the multiple signature reviews required by law were completed. He said it was Lake’s own witnesses that confirmed the counties had abided by election law concerning signature processes, and rejected Lake’s argument based on Reyes v. Cuming that proper elections administration wasn’t adhered to and therefore hindered their ability to argue on a specific number of affected ballots.
“[T]his review was done hastily and possibly not as thoroughly as [complainants] would have liked — but it was done,” wrote Thompson. “This evidence is, in its own right, clear indicia that the comparative process was undertaken in compliance with the statute, putting us outside the scope of Reyes. There is clear and convincing evidence that the elections process for the November 8, 2022, General Election did comply with A.R.S. § 16-550 and that there was no misconduct in the process to support a claim under A.R.S. § 16-672.”
Lake’s team argued that the ballot signatures were processed much too quickly — under one second — to be in compliance with the spirit of the law. Thompson dismissed this argument, saying that time constraints weren’t outlined in the Election Procedures Manual (EPM) and therefore weren’t a standard that could be held against the counties.
“Plaintiff argues that this is so deficient for signature comparison that it amounts to no process at all. Accepting that argument would require the Court to rewrite not only the EPM but Arizona law to insert a minimum time for signature verification and specify the variables to be considered in the process,” stated Thompson. “Plaintiff asks the Court to interpret the word ‘compare’ in A.R.S. § 16-550(A) to require the Court to engage in a substantive weighing of whether Maricopa County’s signature verification process, as implemented, met some analytical baseline. But there are several problems with this. First, no such baseline appears in Section 16-550. Not one second, not three seconds, and not six seconds: no standard appears in the plain text of the statute. No reviewer is required by statute or the EPM to spend any specific length of time on any particular signature.”
Thompson stated the Lake’s witnesses were truthful in their testimonies.
“The Court makes no finding of dishonesty by any witness — and commends those signature reviewers who stepped forward to critique the process as they understood it,” said Thompson.
Thompson declared that no further matters remained on the case, save costs sought by the state and county election officials. Thompson issued a 5:00 pm Tuesday deadline for proposed form of judgment from the defendants, with a 5:00 pm Wednesday deadline for objection to those proposals by Lake’s team.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
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