By Howard Fischer
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PHOENIX - A judge late Monday tossed the last remaining claim by Kari Lake in her bid to overturn the 2022 gubernatorial election, and the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors welcomed the news.

"For the past six months, Ms. Lake has uttered false claims, disparaging county staff and elected officials in her attempt to get a judge to discard the valid votes of hundreds of thousands of Arizona voters,'' Clint Hickman said in a prepared statement.

Hickman cited Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson's conclusion that the county's signature review process complied with state law.

"All voters were provided the opportunity to vote, and all legal votes were counted,'' he said.

Thompson said Lake failed to prove that the county did not review the signatures on early ballot envelopes as required by law. In fact, he said, two of her own witnesses testified that they had personally done such checks.

The judge acknowledged that those two witnesses believed that the process had been rushed and that there was no way for others - themselves not included - to have adequately compared the signatures on the envelopes with others on file with county election officials.

But that, said Thompson, falls far short of what Lake needed to prove that the county ignored entirely the statutory requirement that signatures be compared.

Nor was the judge impressed by the testimony of Eric Speckin, billed by Lake's attorneys as an expert in signature analysis. He told the judge that about 274,000 signatures were compared in less than three seconds, with about 70,000 in two seconds or less.

That argument, Thompson said, was a bid by Lake to convince him that "this is so deficient for signature comparison that it amounts to no process at all.'' And that would have provided the basis for her argument that the county ignored what the law requires of election workers to "compare'' signatures.

But the judge called all of those numbers legally irrelevant.

"There is no statutory or regulatory requirement that a specific amount of time be applied to review any given signature at any level of review,'' Thompson said.

"Not one second, not three seconds and not six seconds: no standard appears in the plain text of the statute,'' the judge said. "No reviewer is required by statute or the Elections Procedures Manual to spend any specific length of time on any particular signature.''

Thompson also brushed aside a parallel argument that what the reviewers were doing hardly meets the legal requirement to "compare'' signatures.

He said the statutes simply require those doing verification to "make some determination as to whether the signature is consistent or inconsistent with the voter's record.''

"The court finds that looking at signatures that, by and large, have consistent characteristics will require only a cursory examination and thus take very little time,'' the judge said.

In December, Thompson ruled against other claims brought by Lake.

One involved her allegation that problems with printers and tabulators at voting centers on Election Day were done intentionally and disenfranchised people who otherwise would have voted for her. The judge said - and the Supreme Court affirmed - there was no evidence to back that claim.

Lake also charged that the county had failed to maintain a legally required chain of custody of ballots, even arguing at one point that more than 35,000 ballots were illegally injected into the tally. Both Thompson and the high court found that argument lacked merit.

Thompson had previously thrown out Lake's charge of failure to review early ballot based on his belief that she was challenging the standards for verification in state law and the Elections Procedures Manual. He said such challenges have to come before and election, not after.

But the Supreme Court told the judge to give Lake another shot at the issue, saying she wasn't challenging the standards but whether the county abided by them. With Monday's ruling, Thompson said she failed to make her case.