PHOENIX — Alleging legal error and illegitimate government intervention, Abe Hamade is asking the Arizona Supreme Court to order a new trial to overturn the race to elect attorney general.
Hamade’s attorneys and the Republican National Committee, in a new filing, said Mojave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jansen’s inadequacy to limit the amount of time he could prepare a legal argument to overturn his loss to Democrat Chris Mays. claimed to have acted This has denied them the ability to find evidence that some people who are legally entitled to vote have not counted their ballots, they said.
They also, if they had more time, reported that tallies had “under-voted” in the Attorney General election — in other words, there were enough situations where voters skipped the election, but ballot inspections were carried out. He argues that he could have proved that there were a sufficient number of circumstances had he not been decapitated. It would show that people actually made a choice. And considering Hamade’s lead over Mays among voters on Election Day, it could more than make up for Hamade’s 280-vote deficit, they say.
But Hamade and his attorneys also accused then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of inadequate detention until six days after the trial that recounts in Pinal County showed discrepancies in totals. They also allege information that could have provided evidence that they hoped the judge would conclude that they acted unfairly. Her lawyers argued that the trial was inadequate, calling the hearing a “farce procedure.”
“That statement is at best reckless and at worst deceptive,” they said before the High Court.
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge issued an order barring the release of county recounts until full statewide results are available. However, Mr. Hamade argued that this only barred county officials from providing information and did not apply to Mr. Hobbes, the defendant in the case based on his position as secretary of state.
“There is no authority for the Chief Defendant to violate his duty of good faith in court and conceal the facts that justify the appellants’ allegations while at the same time falsely alleging that the appellants have no evidence. ,” the legal document states.
The Republican candidate’s defense team also lashed out at Maricopa County, which is also party to the lawsuit, saying it was slow to provide access to timely ballots, while the judge argued: Overrules his objections and confirms Mays as Attorney General.
“State and county officials have used government power and money to occupy a de facto position in election campaigns, conceal public records, and conceal information that corroborates voter-counting issues raised by petitioners in court. and actively tipped the scales of justice,” they said. Said.
Many of Mr. Hamade’s proposals to judges are based on the argument that, given enough time, he can prove himself superior to Mr. Mays.
Prior to the first trial, Mr. Hamade’s legal team was given permission to inspect about 2,300 ballots from Maricopa County.
Of these, the judge acknowledged that 14 ballots had been submitted that could raise questions about whether the votes should be counted, regardless of whether it was Mr. Hamade or Mr. Mays. These were ballots that were not clearly marked.
But Jantzen said that wasn’t enough to determine that the county election officials who manually checked the ballots had committed some kind of fraud.
“Most likely, these 14 ballots were not filled out as instructed, which would be an error in voting,” the judge said.
Even Tim La Sota, who was in charge of the hearing, conceded that even those miscalculations still couldn’t overcome the 511-vote difference that Hamade lost statewide to Mays at the time.
But La Sota said it might have been different if the judge had allowed more ballots from Maricopa, Pima and Navajo counties to be examined. But Mr Jantzen said the demands were beyond the scope of the campaign and needed to be resolved quickly.
The race was so close that a statewide recount was required. And while the change in most counties was small, it wasn’t in Pinal County, where the survey produced 507 ballots that weren’t initially counted.
Hamade won 392 of those, while Mays won 115. But even that wasn’t enough to change the outcome.
He said that if information about Pinal County’s recount was known before the trial, lawyers would have to review more than 68,000 other ballots statewide that had been “under-voted” in the attorney general race. could have argued. The tally machine found that voters did not pick a candidate in that election, even though they did in other elections.
Second, there is the question that some ballots cast on Election Day may not have been counted at all because county records were not properly registered.
Hamade alleges that a computer problem re-enrolled some voters to a “place with some connection” to a different address without the voters’ knowledge or consent.
More than 1,100 votes were affected, according to his lawyers. And given that Hamade was outperformed among voters on Election Day, Hamade actually won the election by more than 150 votes compared to voting for Mays in early voting. they said.
But Hamade said Jantzen’s ruling that the election lawsuit schedule prevented wider disclosure prevented him from finding and presenting that evidence at trial. So he is asking the Supreme Court to rule that these time limits are illegal because they prevent the right to inspect more than a random sample of ballots.
Hamade said all this was enough time for a judge to order a new trial and obtain evidence he believed would overturn the outcome.
It’s unclear how quickly the judge will act. The application is an opportunity to get responses not only from Mayes’ attorneys, but also from the Office of the Secretary of State and Maricopa County attorneys.
Howard Fisher
Mr. Fisher is a longtime award-winning journalist in Arizona and the founder and operator of Capitol Media Services.
