A recount mandated under state law because of how close the final results initially were has confirmed Democratic candidate Kris Mayes, who is actually a former Republican, won Arizona’s race this year for state attorney general.
She is flipping partisan control of the position in which she will serve after outgoing Republican Mark Brnovich’s exit, which in turn follows an unsuccessful campaign he ran in this year’s GOP primary for Senate in Arizona. By hundreds of votes, Mayes defeated Trump-aligned Republican candidate Abe Hamadeh, who brought multiple legal challenges over his defeat after initial results emerged. Hamadeh also proposed expanding state operations focusing on election integrity, and with a precedent in Florida of state authorities aggressively pursuing claimed serious cases targeting individuals accused of illegally casting ballots — to whom authorities provided cues they could legally vote, and judges dismissing several of those cases, an inherent possibility in that was Arizona seeing a similar expansion of threats for those trying to vote. There is not a guarantee any case Hamadeh’s team would have brought would have been actually founded in the facts.
A judge dismissed his earlier case over the results because he filed it before the state’s certification of the results was complete, which preceded the mandated recount. In that case, the substance of which he carried over into his later filing, Hamadeh relied in part on claims for which he evidently didn’t even use any actual data from this year’s Arizona race for attorney general. That list includes disputes about authorities’ handling of ballots unreadable by machines and on which voters’ selections were unclear. For the first, he used figures from 2020, and in challenging how officials dealt with unclear choices, he cited a solitary dispute in Arizona’s 2022 governor’s race.
Other GOP candidates who ran this year in statewide elections in Arizona have also lost in subsequent legal challenges over their defeats. A judge recently imposed over $33,000 in financial penalties on Kari Lake, who made a Trump-supported bid for governor, after she lost in a case disputing — among other things — circumstances surrounding errors with ballot printers used at polling places on Election Day. Asked on the stand about any direct and personal knowledge regarding an intentional conspiracy to alter this year’s election results, not a single trial witness — including those Lake’s team provided — answered that they knew of such misconduct. Lake would have also needed to prove that such a conspiracy if it existed actually altered the election outcome. Disputes centered on those printers, which at some polling places produced ballots not fully dark enough for onsite scanners to read. Voters could still leave their ballots for later tabulation or go to another polling location.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
