Arizona GOP says ballot review found discarded votes for President Trump
The leader of the state Republican Party on Wednesday asked a judge to allow her to inspect thousands of Arizona ballots for irregularities, alleging that an initial review found two instances where officials discarded votes for President Donald Trump.
But the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors stepped in later in the day to announce it would voluntarily provide up to 2,500 more ballots for inspection “to ensure confidence in the election results,” rendering a court order unnecessary.
Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward and her team had received permission to examine an initial 200 ballots earlier this week as part of an ongoing legal challenge that aims to overturn Presidentelect Joe Biden’s win in Arizona by having the court void general election results. The case is set to go to trial Thursday at 10:30 a.m.
In her initial filing, Ward questioned the signature verification process used to authenticate mail-in ballots, as well as the duplication process election officials use to count ballots that tabulation machines couldn’t read. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner allowed her to inspect 100 mailin ballots and 100 duplicate ballots in response, arguing the limited sample would be “enough to let us know if there’s a red flag.”
It was among the duplicate ballots where inspectors found problems of “serious concern,” according to a Wednesday filing from Arizona GOP lawyer Jack Wilenchik.
One original ballot contained what “was clearly a vote for Trump,” but the “duplicate ballot switched the vote to Biden,” he wrote in the court filing. Another ballot “was clearly a vote only for Trump, but the duplicate ballot had a vote for both Trump and a ‘blank’ writein candidate.” That caused the Trump vote to be canceled, Wilenchik wrote, since voters could only choose one candidate in the presidential race.
The Arizona Republic requested copies of the ballots in question in order to independently assess the claims, but the request went unfulfilled by Ward’s legal team and GOP representatives.
For the signature verification review, handwriting experts found that eight to 10 mail-in ballots had “inconclusive” signature matches based on the number of signatures on file, the GOP filing states. Ward’s team noted an inconclusive result isn’t the same as “invalid or fraudulent.”
In her initial complaint, Ward had alleged observers were not invited to be present for the full duplication process for damaged ballots, in which a bipartisan team of county workers interprets votes on the original ballot and fills in a new one that is run through a tabulator. She also had claimed election officials used software that was “highly inaccurate” to read the damaged ballots, “leaving it up to county workers or on-site observers” to catch mistakes.
“There were no errors observed in the sample which granted a vote to Trump, or which canceled out a Biden vote,” Wilenchik wrote in the Wednesday filing. “Given the extremely small sample size” and “the fact that candidates Trump and Biden are apart by less than one half of one percent apart,” he wrote, finding two problematic ballots is significant.
Biden won in Arizona by10,457 votes, according to election results certified Monday, but the statewide canvass does not specify how many ballots required duplication.
In his filing, Wilenchik asked the judge to allow the team to inspect thousands of duplicate ballots and to postpone Thursday’s trial until the review was completed, contending that holding a trial “within only three days of a major elections contest being filed — and with the opportunity to inspect only hundreds out of millions of ballots — denies Plaintiff the opportunity to be meaningfully heard.”
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors’ decision took care of the inspection request. But the judge rejected the call to delay Thursday’s hearing, Wilenchik said late Wednesday.
Roopali Desai, a lawyer for Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, had previously argued Ward’s repeated calls for ballot reviews were attempts to “fish” for something to later be presented at the hearing, and that Ward had no existing evidence of misconduct.