PHOENIX β A federal judge late Wednesday tossed the last of the legal challenges to the decision by Arizona voters to choose Joe Biden for president.
In a strongly worded ruling, U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa said the claims brought by the 11 would-be Republican electors who would vote for President Trump are based on theories that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs conspired with various foreign and domestic individuals and companies to manipulate the results and allow Biden to win.
βThe allegations they put forth to support their claims of fraud fail in their particularity and plausibility,β the judge wrote.
βPlaintiffs append over 300 pages of attachments, which are only impressive for their volume,β Humetewa said. βThe various affidavits and expert reports are largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections.β
The judge said that isnβt the only reason she threw out the case without giving the challengers a chance to present their evidence.
She said federal courts are allowed to handle only those cases where the challengers have actual standing. That, said Humetewa, requires them to show an actual injury, that the injury is fairly traceable to the conduct they are challenging, and that their injury could be addressed by a favorable court ruling.
The electors cannot meet their burden, she said.
They are not candidates for office whose election could be changed with a ruling. Instead, Humetewa said, electors under Arizona law have a purely βministerial functionβ to cast their ballots for the presidential candidate who got the most votes.
βNotably, the Republican candidate whose name was on the ballot is not a plaintiff in this case,β she said.
Humetewa looked no more kindly on the claim that alleged breaches of Arizona election laws permitted illegal votes, allowing voter fraud that effectively diluted lawful votes that were cast.
βAbsent from the complaint is an allegation that plaintiffs (or any registered Arizona voters for that matter) were deprived of their right to vote,β the judge said.
βInstead, they bring baseless claims of disparate treatment of Arizona voters, in subjecting one class of voters to greater burdens or scrutiny than another,β she continued. βThey do not allege what βclassβ of voters were treated disparately.β
Moreover, she said, βTo give plaintiffs the relief they desire would disenfranchise the nearly 3.4 million Arizonans that voted in the 2020 General Election.β
The judge also said that, with narrow exceptions, the U.S. Constitution prohibits individuals from suing the state or the officials named in this lawsuit β Hobbs and Gov. Doug Ducey β in federal court.
βNone of these exceptions are present here,β she wrote.
Humetewa also said the lawsuit, filed earlier this month, comes too late.
She said there are reasons that courts require claims to be brought promptly.
βThe prejudice to the defendants and the nearly 3.4 million Arizonans who voted in the 2020 General Election would be extreme, and entirely unprecedented, if plaintiff were allowed to have their claims heard at this late date,β she said.
Finally, the judge said, the lawsuit sought to block Ducey from transmitting the certified results to federal officials, force Ducey and Hobbs to decertify the election, declare that there was ballot fraud, require a manual recount of early votes and allow the challengers to seize and inspect voting hardware and software as well as security camera recordings.
βObviously, the court cannot enjoin the transmission of the certified results because they already have been transmitted,β Humetewa said. Nothing in federal law even authorizes her to order such an action, she added.
Photos: 2020 General Election in Pima County and Arizona
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Judge throws out lawsuit, finds no fraud or misconduct in Arizona election
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PHOENIX β A judge tossed out a bid by the head of the Arizona Republican Party to void the election results that awarded the stateβs 11 electoral votes to Democrat Joe Biden.
The two days of testimony produced in the case brought by GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward produced no evidence of fraud or misconduct in how the vote was conducted in Maricopa County, said Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner in his Friday ruling.
Warner acknowledged that there were some human errors made when ballots that could not be read by machines due to marks or other problems were duplicated by hand.
But he said that a random sample of those duplicated ballots showed an accuracy rate of 99.45%.
Warner said there was no evidence that the error rate, even if extrapolated to all the 27,869 duplicated ballots, would change the fact that Biden beat President Trump.
The judge also threw out charges that there were illegal votes based on claims that the signatures on the envelopes containing early ballots were not properly compared with those already on file.
He pointed out that a forensic document examiner hired by Wardβs attorney reviewed 100 of those envelopes.
And at best, Warner said, that examiner found six signatures to be βinconclusive,β meaning she could not testify that they were a match to the signature on file.
But the judge said this witness found no signs of forgery.
Finally, Warner said, there was no evidence that the vote count was erroneous. So he issued an order confirming the Arizona election, which Biden won with a 10,457-vote edge over Trump.
Federal court case remains to be heard
Fridayβs ruling, however, is not the last word.
Ward, in anticipation of the case going against her, already had announced she plans to seek review by the Arizona Supreme Court.
And a separate lawsuit is playing out in federal court, which includes some of the same claims made here along with allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
That case, set for a hearing Tuesday, also seeks to void the results of the presidential contest.
It includes allegations that the Dominion Software voting equipment used by Maricopa County is unreliable and was programmed to register more votes for Biden than he actually got.
Legislative leaders call for audit but not to change election results
Along the same lines, Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers on Friday called for an independent audit of the software and equipment used by Maricopa County in the just-completed election.
βThere have been questions,β Fann said.
But she told Capitol Media Services it is not their intent to use whatever is found to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election.
In fact, she said nothing in the Republican legislative leadersβ request for the inquiry alleges there are any βirregularitiesβ in the way the election was conducted.
βAt the very least, the confidence in our electoral system has been shaken because of a lot of claims and allegations,β Fann said. βSo our No. 1 goal is to restore the confidence of our voters.β
Bowers specifically rejected calls by the Trump legal team that the Legislature come into session to void the election results, which were formally certified on Monday.
βThe rule of law forbids us to do that,β he said.
In fact, Bowers pointed out, it was the Republican-controlled Legislature that enacted a law three years ago specifically requiring the stateβs electors βto cast their votes for the candidates who received the most votes in the official statewide canvass.β
He said that was done because Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote nationwide in 2016 and some lawmakers feared that electors would refuse to cast the stateβs 11 electoral votes for Trump, who won Arizonaβs race that year.
βAs a conservative Republican, I donβt like the results of the presidential election,β Bowers said in a prepared statement. βBut I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.β