Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is furious about an upcoming change in election procedures that aims to simplify the detection of fraudulent signatures on mail-in ballots.
It was recently reported that a Yavapai County judge rejected the Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections’ recent lawsuit to prohibit the Arizona Secretary of State from enforcing illegal election procedures relating to mail-in ballot signature verification.
This ruling confirmed that Maricopa County has been conducting elections unlawfully.
The Judge ordered that “the language of the statute is clear and unambiguous,” and the current procedures for verifying mail-in ballot signatures “do not have the force of law.”
According to the current Arizona Elections Procedures Manual, when a mail-in ballot affidavit signature is accepted, or when a voter signs in to vote in person using the touchscreen signature log, the utilized signature gets included in the voter’s “registration record” to be used for future reference.
With these rules, County Recorders only have to consistently manipulate the system by using fake signatures to match previous fraudulent ballots. However, this Judge’s order modifies that and mandates the use of voter registration signatures exclusively.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wanted to include signatures from voters in the registration record that have nothing to do with voter registration.
This is how the last two elections in Maricopa County were stolen. Fraudulent signatures were used to verify the identities of mail-in voters, and hundreds of thousands of signatures were “verified” in just a few seconds each.
Richer is said to be upset that the Judge reinforced the law, stating to the media that contacting the voters to rectify mismatched signatures would result in additional workload. In reality, this will only enhance the accuracy of signature verification. They seem to come up with any excuse in order to evade compliance with the law.
Richer is the same never-Trump Recorder who ran early voting in Arizona’s 2022 election and is now suing Kari Lake.
As reported by Arizona Daily Independent:
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is upset that the court pointed out that signature verification procedures set forth by Katie Hobbs in 2019 when she was secretary of state don’t match the law. Richer alleges that will mean more work.
Richer took to the press to unburden his woes. The county recorder, beset by an unrelenting public scrutiny of election procedures that he translates into constant threats to democracy, told ABC 15 that his office would have to take the extra pains to follow the letter of the law.
“If I had to guess I would say it would result in a lot more curing, meaning we would need to contact the voters and say, hey, your signature doesn’t look like the now only one signature that we have on file for you, that might be from forty or fifty years ago,” Richer said.
The additional responsibility for county recorders became clear after Yavapai County Superior Court Judge John Napper declared in a ruling last week that the 2019 Election Procedures Manual (EPM) by Hobbs “create[d] a process that contradicts” the law.
That ruling rejected Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ motion to dismiss an Arizona Free Enterprise Club lawsuit alleging that Fontes’ interpretation and enforcement of signature verification law, which aligned with that of Hobbs, did not match the actual statute’s language.
