In Arizona on Friday, Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee F. Jantzen dismissed a lawsuit in which failed Republican candidate for state Attorney General Abe Hamadeh was trying to undo the results on the basis of flimsy claims about the handling of this year’s elections.
In an earlier case, the substance of which Hamadeh largely carried over into his more recent lawsuit, the GOP contender didn’t even consistently cite data from this year in outlining his claims. Although that’s not where it ended, earlier filings utilized numbers from 2020 — and from a single dispute in this year’s governor’s race — in establishing his arguments alleging there were problems with handling unreadable ballots and conducting electronic adjudication when choices were unclear, respectively. Hamadeh’s new lawsuit also alleged over 100 provisional ballots cast on Election Day improperly went uncounted, although in proceedings this week, a lawyer for Maricopa County — which is Arizona’s biggest by population and where many conspiracy theories and complaints this year have focused — provided a comprehensive breakdown for how local officials handled provisional ballots from Election Day.
Of 1,942 provisional ballots that weren’t included in official results, 1,935 were from voters who registered after the October 11 registration deadline, and the other seven were filled out by voters registered at commercial addresses, which isn’t allowed. Hamadeh also included claims of local officials putting early ballots in the totals they should have excluded because of signature issues.
Attorneys for the defense argued in court that Hamadeh failed to identify a single individual by name who was unable to cast a ballot because of action by officials, which is a problem similar to issues seen in a lawsuit from Kari Lake, this year’s Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. With a lawsuit she filed, she produced hundreds of accounts from Arizona voters allegedly affected by issues on Election Day. Only three didn’t actually cast a ballot, and for all three that was because they just decided to abandon the process. They weren’t somehow turned away by some problem in the process of completing and submitting a ballot.
None of the voters were “prevented from casting a ballot by the Defendants, but instead each chose not to vote because the declarant decided that waiting in line or visiting a different polling place was a greater inconvenience than the value they placed on voting that day,” Maricopa County noted in a motion to dismiss. In the Hamadeh case, which he brought despite a legally mandated recount of his race already moving forward, sanctions for his attorney already came up. Unlike cases filed by Lake and failed Republican candidate for Arizona Secretary of State Mark Finchem, the Republican National Committee — the main national arm of the Republican Party — joined Hamadeh as a plaintiff, although that obviously wasn’t enough. “The judiciary and the bar needs to step up to the plate here and to sanction this conduct,” Dan Barr, who was representing the victorious Democrat, said in court. “It has gone too far for too long.”
