PHOENIX — State GOP chief Kelli Ward is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to void federal laws that set Monday’s deadline for the vote of the Electoral College.
In a last-ditch effort to salvage her case, attorney Jack Wilenchik argues that Ward was denied her legal right to inspect all the ballots cast in preparing her lawsuit claiming that President Trump really outpolled Joe Biden in Arizona.
Instead, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner permitted inspection of a random sample.
Warner, in limiting what Ward could review, pointed out that federal law required all legal disputes over the presidential election to be completed no later than this past Tuesday.
That is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for resolving electoral issues.
And a separate statute says the electors pledged to the winning candidate cast their vote this coming Monday.
The sixth-ranked Arizona Wildcats women's basketball team routed rival Arizona State 65-37 Thursday night at McKale Center. Arizona has now won three straight over the Sun Devils for the first time since 1999-2000.
Warner threw out Ward’s lawsuit, finding no fraud or misconduct in the Arizona election. The Arizona Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the trial judge’s finding.
But Wilenchik, in his Friday filing, asks the high court to both void the federal deadlines and give Ward more time to prove her allegations that when all the ballots are examined the state’s 11 electoral votes will go to Trump.
“Where the state courts make a final determination of an action without affording the parties a proper opportunity to present evidence, they violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he said.
But for Wilenchik to win that point, he has to convince the nation’s high court that the federal laws on presidential elections — and, specifically, the deadlines they set — are themselves unconstitutional. And those laws have been on the books since at least 1887.
He argues that the only actual deadline federal law can enforce is the one on Jan. 6, the day that Congress meets to count the electoral votes.
Photographer Kelly Presnell's Fave Five of 2020
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With the shut down early in the year, high school sports were canceled. In a series of stories I helped spotlight many of the athletes who had their seasons cut short, including Canyon del Oro senior pitcher Amya Legarra, from April 30, 2020.
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Nationwide, protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against law enforcement abuses, and Tucson was no exception. And on the second night of demonstrations, a protestor dares Tucson Police to hit him with pepper bullets as a few hundred confront law enforcement along 7th Street between 5th and 6th in the early morning hours on May 31, 2020.
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The lock-down and subsequent restrictions led to the resurgence of drive in theaters like a showing of Grease at the Cactus Drive-In at Medella Vina Ranch, May 28, 2020, and nearly a dozen girls from the North and Sabel families piled into the bed of a borrowed pick-up with rented headsets used to hear the audio from the night's feature.
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Sports gradually, and fitfully, returned to the fields and the University of Arizona finally got back on the field November 14, 2020, in a loss to USC where UA defensive back Lorenzo Burns (2) took wide USC receiver Drake London (15) out of mid-air after he tried to leap for extra yardage at Arizona Stadium.
