Mojave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantsen late Friday rejected Abe Hamade’s request for a retrial to contest his loss in the attorney general election.

But it will be Monday when we will know exactly why Hamade and his winning opponent, Democrat Chris Mays, said the judge didn’t present enough evidence for a legal rework.

In the order, Jantzen said he was working on “minutes,” a type of court order, and hoped to have it completed by Friday afternoon. “However, a fire broke out at the courthouse over the weekend and added several emergencies to my calendar, so I wasn’t able to complete that minute’s entry,” the judge wrote.

The order came more than half a year after Jantsen dismissed Hamade’s original challenge to the election results.

“The bottom line is, you just haven’t proven your point,” the judge said at a court ruling in December after a half-day trial. “We don’t have enough information.

Hamade has called for a retrial, saying the issues uncovered in the legally mandated recount of the close race showed that the election could go wrong. This specifically included Pinal County’s finding that 507 votes were not initially counted after the first election results were reported and certified.

Updated results after the recount narrowed Mays’ margin of victory to just 280 votes, but that wasn’t enough to overturn the result.

But Hamade’s lawyers, the Republican National Committee, and two voters restricted ballot inspections ahead of the first trial. He argued that more ballots should be made available for inspection. This, they argue, will allow them to determine whether the client actually received more votes than the final tally showed.

Jantzen said he took their arguments seriously. “In a closely contested election, this is a close call,” the judge said in Friday’s order. However, he said he could not conclude that a new trial was appropriate given the evidence presented, state law and the Arizona Constitution.

In a prepared statement, Hamade said he could not comment on the verdict until he had seen the judge’s rationale. “But we think the situation is very simple. The contest was not as close as it is now,” he said. “If all the statutory votes were counted, I would win the race for Attorney General.” And Mr. Hamade vowed to take the case to the Arizona Supreme Court.

The nature of this appeal is where Jantsen said Hamade’s legal argument fell short, and why Hamade believes having his lawyers examine more ballots would change the outcome. will come down to the point that
Jansen, who ruled against himself in December, said the case must be decided on the basis of a study of 2,300 votes in three counties by lawmakers from both Mays and Hamade. This was due to time constraints during the election campaign.

However, it was later discovered that there were uncounted ballots in Pinal County. His lawyers argued that that alone was enough for him to reopen the case. “Attendees are simply asking for the opportunity to apply the Pinal County process in its entirety to conduct physical inspections and hand-count ballots. “Elections,” they told Jantzen, if repeated elsewhere in And even if Mays had already taken oath, that could be enough evidence for a judge to overturn the outcome, they said.

They even argued for the fact that Mr. Mays actually took office in their favor.

In previous legal battles, a rule was applied that electoral proceedings must be filed and completed within a certain number of days. They said it was no longer a factor and Mr. Hamade should be able to prove his own claim that thousands of Arizonans failed to count the votes.

“The proceedings requested by the participants[Hamade et al.]were rushed according to an artificial schedule, apparently according to the Pinal County Election Commissioner, out of concerns that they would interfere with the delegation of authority to the Attorney General’s Office, as was the initial tally. It was done,” the lawyers said. I have written. “Concerns about completing the contest ahead of schedule are no longer an issue given Mays’ appointment.”

And there are precedents for dismissal of incumbents.

That happened in the 1916 gubernatorial election between incumbent Democrat George W. P. Hunt and Republican challenger Thomas E. Campbell. Mr Campbell was sworn in after the handover had a margin of 30 votes. But while Campbell was acting de facto governor in the interim, Hunt rejected his resignation, challenging the outcome. Ultimately, the Arizona Supreme Court installed Hunt in late 1917 after considering the question of how people marked ballots.

Hamade has another argument for why he thinks he is entitled to a new trial. He said that then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who was also named as a defendant in a legal challenge, had until Dec. 21, before the first trial began, that a recount showed discrepancies with the official vote count. He said he knew it was being done. But the information, which may have persuaded Jantsen to allow further ballot inspections, was not released to Hamade and the public for another eight days after the trial, he said.

But what Mr. Hamade and his lawyers did not say was that Mr. Hobbes, now in office, had been ordered not to make the results public until it was formally clarified in court.