A shit show isn't against the law. Doesn't matter if the judge sees through it, being a judge is about being a human robot who interprets pre-written code, not about trusting your gut or your best judgement. Yes, being a judge is less about personal judgement and more about making sense of hundreds of years of legal writing and decisions and making a choice that doesn't break the edifice.

The printer wasn't working. If the printer isn't printing, you don't just sit around and not print out any ballots. You try and fix it. Especially since "there were delays" was about the only solid evidence the Lake team could muster. You... you claim to be an IT professional and then apparently mix up certification and configuration. Certification doesn't lock in configurations, and I know of no law that mentions specific printer settings like fit-to-screen.

And yes, you do go into an election and try printer settings until they work because you have hordes of people who refuse to use mail-in-voting but also get very upset if in-person voting takes longer than they wanted waiting right there. You don't just refuse to print out some people's ballots because an unexpected printer error happens (which is why voting should be a paper process with a hand-count, but then all the date fetishists on here would get mad) - are you insane? You do whatever you can to get these people's ballots printed out! So their vote can be counted!!

And then when you do, and it still doesn't work, you keep working at it until eventually those votes are counted, while someone else stops the printer error from repeating itself. Which is what happened. Yet again, I must remind you that the 1200 ballots were counted, so there's the entire failure to establish harm as well. I'm sorry, but 1200 votes being counted a few hours later than intended is not a shit show. It's more evidence in favor of handcounts, but it's no disaster.

The best argument that could be made was delays cause lines to swell, and it's possible potential voters see the line and balk or decide to leave the line before voting. Since the Lake team only really had that batch of 1200 in the most densely populated county they couldn't prove anything was widespread and thus systemic. And really, since mail-in voting was available and advertised, "the line was too long" is not a valid excuse to the judicial world which currently holds mail-in voting as acceptable. If you didn't block out the whole day to secure your vote, that says more about you than it does about Kari Lake or her evidence.

Also, it's really hard to prove that someone intentionally tried to throw the election when the only evidence is one handful of ballots that were counted. If it was an evil plan, that's a shit evil plan that doesn't accomplish anything. Occam's Razor says its a heady mixture of human and machine error. Which is why we should have hand counts and not digital ballot scanning. Any money y'all want to spend would be better spent on ballot initiatives (or pressuring state legislature if that's what's needed in Arizona) to remove machines from the voting process, and not tossed away on a hopeless legal case with zero legs to stand on.

The way judges are supposed to work is they are allowed to be human and have emotions and be sympathetic to ideas, narratives, and zeitgeists. But they must put those sympathies aside - the onus is on the plaintiff to bring arguments and evidence that will work within the established legal framework. Lake's team failed to do that, and they couldn't even get one person willing to perjure themselves for a higher cause! That last bit was really my main point - the Lake team came apparently unprepared to play ball in the light or in the shadows. Smells to me like Cyber Ninjas fishing for a quick buck all over again.