Senate President Karen Fann./Photo by Gage Skidmore /Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
The Senate president and a powerful committee chairman made the wrong argument in their lawsuit attempting to force the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to comply with subpoenas related to the 2020 election, but they’re welcome to try again with another, more “plausible” claim, a judge ruled Wednesday evening.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senate President Karen Fann and Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, ruling that the remedy they asked him for is inapplicable.
The two lawmakers asked Warner for what’s known as a writ of mandamus, which requires public officers to perform an official act required of their positions. The supervisors are challenging two subpoenas demanding that they turn over voting machines, ballots, voter data, access to software and other materials from the general election to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which wants to conduct a full forensic audit.
In his ruling on Wednesday, several hours after hearing arguments in the case, Warner said the senators’ request was not appropriate because the supervisors’ duty to comply with the subpoenas stems from the subpoenas themselves, not from their elected positions.
“There is no basis in Arizona statute for treating the subject of a subpoena differently because they are a public official,” Warner wrote.
But that is likely to be far from the end of the case.
