Maricopa County Judge Tosses Out Arizona GOP Lawsuit

PHOENIX — A Maricopa County judge threw out a lawsuit from the Arizona Republican Party Chair that sought to overturn the state's election.

President-elect Joe Biden won Arizona's 11 Electoral College votes in the 2020 election. Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward brought the lawsuit against Maricopa County alleging that errors with duplicated ballots offer proof that the election should be overturned.

In his decision, Judge Steven Warner wrote that Ward "has not proven that the Biden/Harris ticket did not receive the highest number of votes."

Warner went on to write that "The Court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcome of the election."

Warner had previously said he was going to dismiss Ward’s claims that Republican poll observers weren’t given adequate access to the signature-verification of mail-in ballots and duplicated ballots, saying those complaints should have been brought to the court sooner. The judge let the rest of Ward’s case go to trial.

Lawyers for the county urged Warner in court on Friday to dismiss the case, arguing there was no evidence of fraud in how ballots were processed in Phoenix and that the number of votes President Donald Trump could have lost due to human error wasn’t enough for him to carry the state.

The attorneys said the error rate among duplicated ballots was minuscule and that it would be an extraordinary move to for a court to reverse an election in which more than three million Arizonans voted.

“There is no way any of this evidence could justify throwing out the votes of the people of Arizona because somebody didn’t like the results,” said Tom Liddy, an attorney representing Maricopa County election officials.

A court-ordered sampling of 1,626 duplicated ballots found Trump lost seven votes due to errors in ballot processing in Maricopa County. An election official, Scott Jarett, had testified Trump could have lost 103 votes if the error rate were extrapolated across all 27,800 duplicated ballots in the county. Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.

Attorneys for Ward had argued that voting results in southeastern Maricopa County were “strongly inconsistent” with voter registration and historical voting data. Attorney Jack Wilenchik said that most of the errors discovered in the sampling of duplicated ballots caused Trump to lose more votes than Biden and that the software used in processing such ballots would “prefill” Biden’s name on ballots.

“We have brought this case for good reason,” Wilenchik told the court.

But not everyone agreed: Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, also rebuked his party's attempts to overturn the election results in a statement Friday.

"As a conservative Republican, I don't like the results of the presidential election," Bowers wrote. "I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election."

He also dismissed a push from Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, who called for the Legislature to step in and replace electors legally pledged for Biden with others who would support Trump. Bowers said Giuliani presented theories of voter fraud but no proof, and he said there’s no way the Legislature could reverse the will of the voters.

Four previous election challenges in Maricopa County were dismissed, including one filed by the Arizona Republican Party that sought to determine whether voting machines were hacked.

Arizona's election results were certified Monday after all 15 Arizona counties had done so. The Electoral College is set to meet on Dec. 14.

In a tweet, the Arizona Republican Party warned Friday's decision wouldn't end its fight.

"See you at the Supreme Court," the official Twitter account wrote.

The Associated Press contributed to this reporting.