Judge to Hamadeh: 'You just haven't proven your case'

A judge declined Friday to overturn the election for attorney general and declare Republican Abe Hamadeh the winner.

“The bottom line is, you just haven’t proven your case,’’ Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen told Hamadeh’s attorney Tim La Sota.

He said any mistakes that may have been made in how ballots were counted “were not enough to overcome the presumption the court has to have in election cases ... that the election was done correctly.’’

“There isn’t enough information — I don’t think even slight information — the election was done illegally or incorrectly,’’ Jantzen said in ruling from the bench after the half-day trial.

The judge acknowledged there were 14 ballots presented — out of about 2,300 reviewed — where there could be some question of whether a vote should have been counted, whether for Hamadeh or for winning Democrat Kris Mayes. These were ballots where the marks were less than clear.

But Jantzen said that isn’t enough for him to rule that county election officials, who checked these ballots by hand, did something wrong.

“For the most part, these 14 ballots would be voter error, not filling them out the way the instructions say,’’ the judge said.

Even La Sota conceded that extrapolating out these alleged errors would still not overcome the 511-vote deficit by which Hamadeh lost to Mayes statewide.

He said, though, it might have been different had the judge allowed him to examine more ballots from Maricopa, Pima and Navajo counties. But Jantzen said that request went beyond the scope of what’s allowed in election contests which have to be resolved quickly.

The results of the race are still not official.

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All 15 counties are conducting a recount, required under Arizona law because the margin of difference was so small. That tally is expected to be announced next week.

Hamadeh responded in a Twitter post to the ruling, saying, “There are thousands of uncounted provisional ballots.”

Provisionals are ballots that are accepted but set aside for a variety of reasons, including a voter’s failure to produce required identification at a polling place, the lack of the person’s name on voter registration rolls, or an indication the person already voted.

That last situation became an issue in this race after some Maricopa County voters, finding long lines at some locations due to printer and tabulator issues, chose to leave to go to a nearby site. But unless they formally “checked out’’ of the first polling place the records listed them as having voted.

La Sota acknowledged, however, that county officials said they did go back through the last category and count those provisional ballots after determining there were no other votes cast that day.

Nonetheless, Hamadeh contended in his tweet, “Thousands of voters were disenfranchised.”

The judge said he had to decide the case based on the examination of 2,300 ballots in the three counties by representatives of Hamadeh, Mayes and the court.

Hamadeh countered, “Based on the constraints imposed on us by the court and the obstruction of the opposing side, we were only given six hours with three people to attempt to go through 2.5 million ballots.”

That misstates the fact that the law in Arizona, recognizing the small amount of time between an election and when people take office, allows access to a sample of ballots — a sample selected by the challenger.