Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael, speaking at a primary election night watch party in Scottsdale in 2016. /Photo by Gage Skidmore/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0
By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
A Maricopa County judge blasted the Arizona Republican Party’s lawsuit challenging procedures for post-election hand counts as “meritless” and defective on a number of grounds.
Superior Court Judge John Hannah dismissed the state GOP’s lawsuit in November, but didn’t provide any reasoning at the time, saying only that he would issue a full ruling at a later date. On Monday, he issued the ruling, writing that the Arizona Republican Party had no chance of success.
State law requires counties to conduct limited hand counts of ballots immediately after the election, if the state’s recognized political parties choose to participate. They count all ballots cast in person from at least 2 percent of precincts, as well as 1 percent of early ballots. Instead of precincts, some counties use vote centers, where any voter in the county can cast a ballot. The state’s election procedures manual, which statute grants the force of law, allows those counties to base their post-election audits on vote centers rather than precincts.
Nonetheless, the state Republican Party sued Maricopa County, arguing that it erred by not counting ballots based on precincts. It asked Hannah to order a new audit of 2 percent of precincts, and to bar Maricopa County from certifying its election results until that was completed.
In his ruling, Hannah gave several reasons for why he dismissed the case instead.
