Meet the Young Attorney Who May Have Saved Kari Lake’s Arizona Election Challenge

Ryan Heath is a 31-year-old new attorney in Arizona who started The Gavel Project, an “anti-woke nonprofit” that fights for “civil liberties on behalf of victims suffering from the abuses of woke ideologues.” He’s filed and threatened lawsuits over masks, CRT, and mutilating children in the name of “affirmative care.”

In January, unlike most “conservative” attorneys who run from cases involving voter disenfranchisement of Republicans, due to the risk of being disbarred by left-wing dominated state bars, Heath jumped right in and sued the judge who dismissed Kari Lake’s election contest with a writ of mandamus. He demanded that Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson vacate his ruling and award the election to Lake.

Heath relied on Reyes v. Cuming, a 1997 Arizona case involving similar circumstances, where voters’ signatures on the ballot envelopes were not compared to the voter registration list, which violated a non-technical statute so the court held it was material. Strangely, the Reyes case was mysteriously suppressed from legal research, so it was almost impossible to find until Heath stumbled on it.

In Reyes, the Arizona Court of Appeals cited Miller v. Picacho Elementary School District No. 33, “Miller established that an election contestant need only show that absentee ballots counted in violation of a non-technical statute changed the outcome of the election [or rendered it ‘uncertain’]; actual fraud is not a necessary element.” Although the incumbent Yuma County Supervisor had been in office a year after the contested election, the court booted him out of office and replaced him with the challenger.

Predictably, a judge ducked Heath’s lawsuit, ruling that he should have filed it instead as an amicus curiae brief in Lake’s case, which Heath complied with and did along with Alexander Haberbush of the Lex Rex Institute. In response to the lower courts’ contention that procedural challenges must be brought before an election, otherwise, they are barred by the doctrine of laches, Heath said in his brief that Lake had no way of knowing before the election that these violations were occurring, and they weren’t procedural violations.

“[H]er objections regarding verification were never objections to Maricopa’s existing election procedures but, rather, objections to the fact that votes were illegally counted,” he argued. He cited case law which distinguished the doctrine of laches from barring claims about “alleged acts of misconduct that occurred prior to an election” versus “acts of alleged misconduct that occurred during the ‘voting process.’”

The Arizona Supreme Court threw out all of Lake’s arguments except that one, stating that her “signature verification challenge is to the application of the policies, not to the policies themselves,” so the doctrine of laches does not apply. They remanded it to the trial court, where the judge will need to come up with a better excuse than laches in order to dismiss the massive evidence showing voters’ signatures were not properly verified.

Lake said after the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling, “Three whistleblowers came forward with revelations of massive failures in the signature verification process. These whistleblowers were intimately involved in the process and they allege that Maricopa County WILLFULLY ignored law and procedure.” Dr. Walter Daugherity, a math professor at Texas A&M University, testified to the Arizona Senate Election Committee in January that he was 99.999 percent confident there were 290,644 bad signatures accepted in the election.

Since 2020, most judges have immediately thrown out election contests involving voter disenfranchisement of Republicans. Thompson didn’t even put much effort into it, merely issued a brief 10-page opinion, which was a mockery of the immense amount of evidence Lake brought in her lawsuit. He knew there was little chance he’d be reversed, since judges are terrified to rule in favor of Republicans on this issue. Where it doesn’t benefit Republicans, judges often order new elections based on merely a handful of voters being disenfranchised.

But finally the Arizona Supreme Court has been forced to confront the mounds of evidence that continues to pile up. In Abe Hamadeh’s election contest challenging his alleged loss to Democrat Kris Mayes for Arizona Attorney General by 280 votes, the closest statewide race in Arizona’s history, he discovered well into his lawsuit that tabulators misread valid votes as undervotes in Pinal County, which reduced Mayes’ lead from 511 to 280. Then-Arizona Secretary of State Hobbs knew about the additional votes for eight days but did not inform the public or Hamadeh. Hamadeh wants the undervotes counted in other counties.

The longtime respected pollster Rasmussen Reports conducted an exit poll of likely Arizona voters this month, asking them how they voted in last year’s midterm election. An astounding 8% more said they voted for Lake over Hobbs, 6% more said they voted for Hamadeh over Mayes, and 1% more voted for Republican Mark Finchem for Secretary of State over Democrat Adrian Fontes, the cartel lawyer who allegedly won. Finchem is also challenging his alleged defeat in court.

Unlike some attorneys who cower when it comes to election fraud and other areas where patriots are under attack, Heath is taking the exact opposite approach. In response, the left has filed six frivolous bar complaints filed against him in two separate states.

Heath started The Gavel Project in 2021 after hearing California Governor Gavin Newsom announce that he was going to make vaccination a contingent precedent to attend school in California. Heath spent significant amounts of time traveling around California helping fight the mandate, speaking at school board meetings and training parents on sending their children to school without masks to peacefully protest.

Last year, Heath successfully threatened litigation against Phoenix Children’s Hospital, forcing it to back down on requiring the COVID-19 jab for employees.

Heath says on his Substack, “My job is to stand up to bullies for those who cannot.” He reiterated what cultural commentator Matt Walsh has said, “When people publicly proclaim that your mere presence is ‘harmful’ to their existence, they are (in effect) provoking violence against you.” Heath’s work is supported by crowd source funding and he provides updates on Twitter and his Substack.

Predictably, a judge ducked Heath's lawsuit, ruling that he should have filed it instead as an amicus curiae brief in Lake's case, which Heath complied with and did along with Alexander Haberbush of the Lex Rex Institute. In response to the lower courts’ contention that procedural challenges must be brought before an election, otherwise, they are barred by the doctrine of laches, Heath said in his brief that Lake had no way of knowing before the election that these violations were occurring, and they weren't procedural violations.

Of course the irregularities were not procedural in nature they constituted vote fraud on the part of Maricopa Count.

The Judge is using tortured, circular logic by which he will only consider provable fraud (one of the most difficult, if not often impossible to prove legals claims) and then classified that same fraudulent act as a procedural issue to bar Lake from actually investigating and presenting proof of the fraud claims he incorrectly mandated to satisfy his ludicrously incorrect, made up out of whole cloth standard that only demonstrably proven fraud rises to occasion to overturn the results of a clearly stolen election.

Gee, even trying to describe tortured circular logic this judge used to shut down Kari Lake and deny her full and fair hearing to even present her obvious and irrefutable evidence of open Maricopa County vote fraud and manipulation produces a tortured circular logic explanation that is barely comprehensible. Sorry 'bout that folks. I tried my best.

I pray that even fair minded Democrats are getting fed up with judges using arguments of standing and procedural technicalities to block courts dismissing legal challenges to transparently stolen elections via in your face, open and obvious vote fraud

Strangely, the Reyes case was mysteriously suppressed from legal research, so it was almost impossible to find until Heath stumbled on it.

Amazing what can happen when the Deep State also controls Lexus/Nexus.

I think that this is going to back fire on those responsible.

The judge could have rushed through the case quickly which would have allowed Maricopa County and Katie Hobbs to cover up the evidence and use the media full court press propaganda campaign it put up to support the election theft. This would have allowed. the judge to run the clock out on Lake and finesse a bogus ruling that was somewhat plausible and new evidence, no matter how compelling, is generally inadmissible in appeals court proceedings.

This strategy really would have put a stake trough the heart of any attempts by Lake to re visit her strongest, most compelling and most provable claims.

Instead, the Judges stone walling has given Lake time to more fully collect evidence to document her claims of electoral misconduct.

The media smoke screen supporting Hobbs has dissipated and Hobbs is losing support as she pursues a radical agenda that would have shocked even ex Gov Janet Napolitano and completely ignores campaign promises to secure the border and push an initiative to solve Arizona's water needs and implement solutions to secure Arizona's long term water supply security.

Amazingly, good ol’ Katie didn't waste any time and has even given the Az Supreme Court the middle finger and a sharp elbow to the ribs on some critical issues as some of her first acts in office.

Anyone who knows legal research knows that if you aren't looking through the computer, you'd have to look through volumes amount of case law books before you find something.

He probably did stumble across it, but only after working his way through stacks of case law books.

The point here is that the references and links to the case were deliberately removed from multiple legal research computer data bases and their associated search engines, all of which are very good at searching and locating relevant case law.

Instead, he had to go back through 25 + years of actual hard copy bound volumes of Az Appeals case law to locate the relevant precedents. This is a lot of work with a huge volume of documents to review.

More importantly, the presiding judge was also unable to locate the hidden and seemingly suppressed case work that supported Lakes claims so he formulated his legal theory and drafted his decision on both partial and outright incorrect knowledge of the relevant law governing the Lake election challenge. .

This is highly irregular and pretty much everyone in the legal system realizes that this simply does not happen by accident. If the case was removed from an official Az state legal data base that removal may actually rise to the level of a criminal act.

It also suggests an attempt to conceal evidence in order to further a act of election fraud.

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