A witness in the Kari Lake trial began crying while on the stand as the former GOP candidate for governor made her last remaining arguments in her lawsuit contesting the results of Arizona’s 2022 election.
On Wednesday, the trial over the only remaining claim from Lake’s election lawsuit—that election officials in Maricopa County failed to perform higher-level signature verification on ballots that had been flagged by lower-level screenings—began.
After identifying herself as a former election worker in Maricopa County, Jacqueline Onigkeit was asked by the judge why she wanted to get involved in the county’s election process to begin with.
“I’m doing this for my children. I have five children and nine grandchildren and I want their vote to count,” Onigkeit said as she started to cry. Onigkeit, whom Lake described as a “whistleblower” on Twitter, continued to testify between sobs, saying she worked in both the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms. When the judge asked if she was OK, she apologized for crying.
Before her testimony began, Onigkeit said she is a registered Republican but had voted for former President Barack Obama.
More than four months after Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs took office, Lake is still challenging Hobbs’ victory. Lake lost by more than 17,000 votes in last November’s midterm race.
Newsweek reached out to Hobbs via email for comment.
Lake’s lawsuit brought several claims disputing the results of the election, but only one is left. Eight of her original claims were tossed out before the initial trial began, and another claim, about ballot printing issues, which she was given a chance to prove, was dismissed by a court.
Lake faces a particularly high bar in proving her final claim. Not only does she have to prove that higher-level signature verification was overlooked but she has to convince the judge that this affected the outcome of the gubernatorial election.
On Wednesday, Onigkeit testified that she felt pressured and “uncomfortable” after supervisors asked her and other election workers to re-review some of the ballots that had already been rejected, saying she didn’t want to approve ballots that had already been tossed out. She described the situation as “very overwhelming.”
Onigkeit, who was trained for “approximately five days,” said a number of those ballots had “bad signatures” and that some of the envelopes had names or addresses that were different from voter history records.
Asked during the cross-examination if she performed her duties in verifying signatures, Onigkeit said, “Yes, I did.”
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