Journalists’ Roundtable: Katie Hobbs, Kari Lake, Justine Wadsack

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. To discuss the week’s top stories, we were joined by Bob Christie with Capitol Media Services, Howie Fischer with Capitol Media Services and Jim Small with Arizona Mirror.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• Hobbs dismisses talk of keeping Trump off ballot
• Legislature to sue Biden over monument?
• 9^th Circuit hears Lake/Finchem appeal
• Lake celebrates Trump’s actions on 9/11
• Lake and Masters on “paranoid” phone call
• Wadsack pushes 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

9th Circuit hears appeal

Howie Fischer: “I’ve seen this movie, I think. This is Kari Lake insisting that ‘I am the Governor,’ but this goes to the whole question of the use of voting machines. Voting machines, she says, ‘are inherently untrustworthy; they can be hacked; all sorts of things can happen; things can go wrong.’ What the trial court judge said is, ‘Where is your evidence of any of that actually happening? Can you show me where the vote totals were changed?’ ‘No, but, the potential is enough, we think, to be able to have you say you cannot use machines.’ This leads to the question of if the ability to change vote totals is the grounds for doing this, then hand counts work the same way.”

Jim Small: “It’s kind of amazing that we are still litigating this case because it was filed April or May of 2022. When this case was filed, they demanded that the court make Arizona use paper ballots; well, we already do.”

Bob Christie: “Now they’re at the appeals court with three judges, and they did no better than what they did at the first round. These are not voting machines; these are vote counting machines: you fill out your paper ballot, you stick it into the machine, and it reads it. Their argument is these machines are made in China, therefore they can be hacked.”