Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward is asking a court to declare the state’s election results as void.

 Bob Christie / The associated Press file

PHOENIX — The head of the Arizona Republican Party is asking a court to declare the election results that gave the state’s 11 electoral votes to Joe Biden as void.

Legal papers filed late Wednesday on behalf of party chairwoman Kelli Ward claim the system used in Arizona to check signatures on mail-in ballots lacks sufficient safeguards to ensure they came from the registered voters whose envelopes were submitted.

The lawsuit also contends legally required observers were unable to see the process from where they were placed.

Ward asserts as well that the process for dealing with damaged ballots did not result in them being accurately recorded.

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs responded in a written statement: “This is just the latest in a series of frivolous lawsuits and is nothing but a last-ditch effort to undermine the credibility of the election.

“The Secretary of State’s Office trusts that the court will continue to do the right thing.”

A hearing is set for Monday, Nov. 30, in Maricopa County Superior Court.

GOP chairwoman wants election results set aside

Ward most immediately wants a court to order production of a reasonable sampling of the signatures on the ballot envelopes so they can be compared to signatures on file.

She also wants an inspection to compare damaged ballots with the duplicates that were created by election workers to allow them to be scanned.

But the real goal is to have the court set aside the results of the election.

That could happen in two ways.

One would be for a judge to conclude that, given the problems, “the result of the election is fundamentally unknown.” That, according to the lawsuit, would require voiding the election.

By itself, that act would mean Biden is not entitled to the state’s 11 electoral votes.

What could happen next, though, is that it would allow the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature to make the final decision of declaring which slate of electors won: those pledged to Biden or those pledged to President Trump.

The Downtown Links Project in Tucson will be a 4-lane road that parallels the Union Pacific Railroad and connects Barraza-Aviation Parkway at Broadway Road to Interstate 10 via St. Mary's Road. The expected completion date is early 2023. Video by: Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star (2020)

The other option would occur if a judge ruled, particularly on how the damaged ballots were handled, that votes for Trump were instead given to Biden.

And that would permit the judge to declare that the Trump-pledged electors got more votes than those pledged to Biden, said Ward’s attorney, Jack Wilenchik.

Previous attempts failed in courts

But time is running out for Ward and the state GOP to come up with evidence.

Federal law requires that all challenges and recounts related to presidential elections be resolved no later than Dec. 8. The Electoral College vote is six days later.

Prior litigation in Arizona by the Trump campaign after the election sought to show that election procedures were not followed or that counting machines did not properly record votes.

But all have been dismissed after judges said challengers failed to prove their claims.

And claims of fraud raised in litigation across the nation have been thrown out when attorneys for the Trump campaign failed to produce any evidence.

This case does not make such allegations. Instead, it claims that the procedures used failed to guarantee accurate results.

“While Arizona has been using mail-in voting since 1992, the process has comparatively few safeguards to ensure the integrity of mail-in ballots and to protect against mistake or fraud,” Wilenchik wrote.

He said that someone who wants to vote in person must provide either a photo ID or two forms of recognized identification.

By contrast, Wilenchik said, the process for mail-in votes involves someone manually checking the signature on the outside of the envelope to see how it compared with any scanned signatures on file. He said the workers doing that job typically have fewer than six hours of training.

“Further, in Arizona, copies of a registered voter’s scanned signature are publicly available from the Department of Motor Vehicles, if they have a driver’s license, among other places, making a voter’s signature relatively easy to reproduce,” Wilenchik said.

The Arizona Department of Transportation said that claim is untrue, and that information such as MVD signature records is protected under federal and state privacy laws.

Wilenchik acknowledged that when a worker questions a signature, a bipartisan team reviews it to determine if it actually is valid.

“However, if a county worker does not question a signature, then there is no adjudication or further review, much less by a bipartisan team, which again makes it easier for false or otherwise insufficient signatures to escape detection,” Wilenchik wrote.

He also complained that legal observers in Maricopa County were told to remain at a card table, at least 10 feet away from computer monitors and screens, and those monitors “were mostly turned away.”

The damaged ballots that were rejected by machines present a different issue.

Wilenchik said a bipartisan team of county workers would create a new “duplicate” ballot by interpreting the intent of the voter, filling in an “electronic” ballot, and sending it to an offsite printing company to print a new duplicate to be run through the machine.

But he complained there were no observers at that offsite location to determine whether the new ballots were properly prepared.

And Wilenchik contended software that would try to read and prefill the rejected ballot was highly inaccurate and would flip votes. He claimed the software would “erroneously prefill ‘Biden’ much more often (apparently twice as often) as it did ‘Trump.’”

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