PHOENIX — A Republican who lost last year’s Arizona Attorney General election wants the court to set a new trial briefing schedule in his case seeking to overturn the victory of Democrat Chris Mays. But the judge has yet to rule on whether he actually deserves a trial. .
New filings by Abe Hamade’s lawyers show he is growing impatient with the delay in making a decision. They have asked Mojave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen to hold a scheduled meeting to set a deadline for pretrial matters, and if litigants request a hearing, the court will hold a hearing. It cites a rule of court that “must set.”
The petition was signed by Attorney Jennifer Wright, one of several lawyers representing Mr. Hamade in an effort to overturn the closest statewide election in Arizona’s history. The automatic recount put Mays ahead of Hamade by just 280 votes, short of his 511 win after the initial count.
Before Mays took office, Wright headed the election integrity arm of former Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovic. He said the request was unusual but important because a victory in the new court would put Mays out of office and replace him with Hamade.
“Plaintiffs understand that this court has not yet ruled on the motions for a new trial and do not speculate what this court may find appropriate and fair,” Wright said. wrote Mr. But she said the deadline would shorten “the period of uncertainty among Arizonas as to who will be duly elected by voters as the state’s true attorney general in the November 2022 general election.” said it would.
Election lawyers not involved in the case say there is likely a more nuanced reason for the charges.
“In some cases, it could be seen as an instruction to wink or nod, or even a request for the court to expedite judgment on the subject matter at issue,” said Phoenix election attorney and former state campaigner unrelated to the case. Director Eric Spencer said. . “It is perfectly acceptable practice to put anything in a court’s mailbox that could have the collateral effect of hastening another judgment.”
And Mr. Hamade filed his first lawsuit to suspend the results a month after the 2022 general election — and still says he won more votes than Mr. Mays, given the chance to prove it. I believe – I want things to move forward.
In December, Mr Jansen ruled against Mr Hamade’s challenge to the original election, saying he could not prove that Mr Hamade actually received more votes than Mr Mays.
What keeps the case alive is that there was an automated recount in which about 500 uncounted ballots were found in Pinal County.
Hamade recovered 392 of them. But even that wasn’t enough to close the gap with Mays, who was declared the winner by 280 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes statewide.
Pinal County officials have since blamed the disparity on human error.
Attorneys for the Republican candidate sought a new trial, arguing that the current governor: Katie Hobbs did not disclose the recount results in the first trial in December over Hamade’s campaign. Hobbes, a Democrat, was then secretary of state and head of election administration in Arizona.
Wright also claimed that more than 1,000 ballots were not counted due to problems with voter registration.
And Wright also wants to look at ballots that don’t show votes for the Attorney General election to determine if Hamade was actually voted.
In Maricopa County, more than 50,000 ballots showed so-called “undervoting” in the Attorney General election, meaning voters made choices in other elections but skipped that one according to machine tallies. so this is extremely important. They argue that the race is so close that the public and Hamade have the right to scrutinize the ballots to make sure Mays is indeed the winner.
All of this led to a hearing on May 16, when Hamade’s lawyers called for a rerun of the December trial.
Hobbes’ attorneys, Mays’ attorneys, and Maricopa County attorneys argued that Hamade was wrong about the law and the facts and urged Jantzen to abandon his attempts to force a retrial. As for his claim that the recounts were suppressed, he also said that Hobbes was prevented from disclosing those findings before the judge did.
More importantly, they told Jantzen at the hearing that Hamade was fishing and had no real evidence to support his claims.
“Rather, their arguments in this court can be summed up as: ‘The election is coming. If you let me keep looking, maybe I’ll find something,'” Mays’ attorney Alexis Dannemann told the judge.
At the end of the hearing on May 16, the judge said he hoped to have a ruling on the new lawsuit “within the next few weeks.”
That didn’t happen. According to the rules governing state courts, he has 60 days to decide on the case and must do so by mid-July.
Spencer said he was not considering new court filings and said a new court decision in Hamade’s favor could overturn decades-old rules for contesting election results. said to be sexual.
State law provides very early deadlines for election challenges so that the process can be completed within two months after the election and the public and candidates can be confident of the outcome.
“If you go to court with the information you have at the time, you’ll have all the issues resolved within a few weeks of the canvas going into effect,” Spencer said, referring to what happened in early December.
“But if this motion for a new trial is successful and discovery takes place, it seems the litigants have found a way to sort of resolve these issues in the months ahead,” he said. Potentially more important, Spencer said, would allow Hamade to make “the kind of robust discovery that is not normally available” in election litigation, which is usually expedited.
“And they would have found a loophole in existing campaign practices,” he said.
