An Arizona judge has rejected a request from Republicans to seal evidence that their lawyers were set to submit in their lawsuit alleging that Arizona poll workers didn’t properly give voters the chance to fix issues with their ballots on Election Day. The Republican plaintiffs in the case — including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the Arizona Republican Party — claimed that the issues they’ve uncovered could have affected thousands of ballots, but this week, local election officials estimated that only about 180 ballots could be affected by the claims. More broadly, local election officials’ legal team insisted that members of the public have “a right to know how flimsy” that Republicans’ “evidence actually is.”
Republican attorney Kory Langhofer had cited issues like the presence of personally identifying information in the Republicans’ evidence in her effort to convince Judge Daniel Kiley to seal the material. The personal identifiers included addresses and partial Social Security numbers, and the Republicans also planned to submit video footage that had been captured inside of a polling place — although taking photos or videos within 75 feet of a polling place while that polling place is in use is a crime in Arizona. Maricopa County attorney Thomas Liddy said that it would be “counterintuitive to have individuals invade the privacy of voters and violate their right to vote in secret and then use the fruit of that potentially illegal activity to advance a civil case.” In other words, the Republicans ought not to get special treatment while relying on potentially illegal footage, although that special treatment is exactly what they were seeking.
Representing local officials, Liddy said that the Republican lawsuit is “not a standard, run-of-the-mill election law challenge,” adding that plaintiffs wanted the court to seal “significantly more than what is protected by statute with no legal or factual basis.” Discussing the proceedings, Liddy insisted that “it is not in the interest of justice to do this in secret.” After all, it’s not as though the Republicans have kept their allegations particularly secretive to begin with. They have trumpeted their frequently entirely baseless claims of electoral misconduct from the metaphorical rooftops at just about every opportunity.
Liddy commented, in part, as follows:
‘Plaintiffs chose to bring this lawsuit, calling into question the integrity of the electoral process. The public deserves to see all the evidence so that it can have confidence in this election.’
Judge Kiley concluded that he would allow the redaction of personal identifiers including Social Security numbers, birthdays, and signatures, but he declined to seal the rest of the case files.
The challenges to election integrity that Republicans have brought across the U.S. have frequently proven totally meritless.
For example: at a recent press conference in Nevada, conservative activist Matt Schlapp claimed that a “whistleblower” had come forward to reveal having seen a van marked with Biden/ Harris signage in which people were opening ballots and refilling envelopes with ballots that were, presumably, more favorable to Democrats. How stupid do Republicans think that the American people are? There’s not a shred of evidence for the so-called whistleblower’s claims; it’s 2020, so where’s the smartphone footage? Where’s the security camera footage? Why would someone perpetrating fraud have done so in a Biden/ Harris van that was supposedly in plain sight?
