The final results of the legally-mandated recount of the Arizona Attorney General’s race found what Republican candidate Abe Hamadeh described as “an unusually high discrepancy rate and swing”. Election authorities reported that they had found 623 additional statewide votes – mostly in Pinal County – the clear majority of which were for Hamadeh.
The election margin, which was originally reported to be 511 votes in favor of Democrat Kris Mayes, has now been cut nearly in half to just 280 votes.
Every day that goes by my opponent’s lead has been shrinking. This recount has an unusually high discrepancy rate and swing. This is all without a complete inspection of the ballots.
My opponent gained 196 votes, I gained 427.
The outcome of this election is uncertain.
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) December 29, 2022
In response to the announcement, Hamadeh’s legal team filed a Motion for Stay to preempt Mayes’ inauguration and keep incumbent Republican Mark Brnovich in office while the matter is further investigated.
The precedent of the current office-holder remaining in place is precedent that my opponent’s attorney previously mentioned in court. We agree. pic.twitter.com/Q8OlQwcxWt
— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) December 29, 2022
Less than two hours after that Tweet, Arizona GOP Chair Dr. Kelli Ward reported that Hamadeh’s motion was denied. However, Valiant News was unable to confirm this independently.
Maricopa judge denied @AbrahamHamadeh’s motion to stay. Says “the case is over.”
— Dr. Kelli Ward ???????? (@kelliwardaz) December 29, 2022
As reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, the results of the recounts were originally set to be released on December 22nd but Secretary of State Katie Hobbs – whose office managed the 2022 election and who is embroiled in her own disputed race for Governor – stonewalled the results until after the courts had dismissed election challenges from Hamadeh and Kari Lake, her Republican opponent.
This revelation prompted accusations that Hobbes, knowing that there were large and unexplained discrepancies in the vote count, concealed this fact from the courts to ensure that Republican election challenges failed before that news could come out.
This isn’t the first time Arizona election officials have been accused of covering up irregularities to benefit Democrats’ prospects in court: Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarret testified on Dec. 21 that there were absolutely no problems with machines printing unreadable ballots on Election Day, only to admit in further testimony the following day – after a Kari Lake expert testified about the problem in detail – that this was indeed a known issue that had been documented in an ongoing internal investigation prior to his initial court appearance, an investigation that he had been aware of but had not made public.
This compounded complaints by the Lake legal team that Arizona election officials had either refused to produce legally-mandated chain of custody documentation for hundreds of thousands of votes or had failed to create it in the first place.
The stunning admission went viral after being posted by Viva Frei, a Montreal litigator-turned-YouTuber named David Freiheit, during his live coverage of the Lake v. Hobbs election trial with election law expert and populist civil rights lawyer Robert Barnes.
They were performing a “root cause analysis” on problems that didn’t exist, while withholding the existence of the problem from the public. no problem!
No portion of the judgement dismissing @KariLake’s lawsuit addresses this unbelievable admissionpic.twitter.com/NEA1vBFd8x
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) December 24, 2022
To date, all contests to the Arizona election have been dismissed by trial court judges, citing a lack of evidence that widespread irregularities intentionally flipped any elections and also chiding Republicans for failing to file challenges before the election. However, Lake’s team had indeed filed a lawsuit before the election which accurately predicted that the voting tabulation machines would fail and the trial judge in that case deemed the charges so ludicrous that he ordered her legal team to be sanctioned for even bringing the case.
In his coverage, Barnes was brutal in his criticism of the legal rationale at play. He claimed that long-standing Arizona election law precedent does not require conclusive proof that an election was flipped due to intentional fraud, merely that the documented number of invalid ballots exceeded the margin of victory.
In addition, he savaged the idea that election contests could be dismissed for being filed after Election Day, since courts have routinely ruled pre-election suits invalid because no injury had yet been suffered.
Hamadeh, Lake and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem have all refused to concede despite their legal losses and have vowed to appeal. In a video on the Locals.com community he shares with Viva Frei, Barnes lamented the lack of courage in the moderate-Republican-dominated Arizona courts and described Lake’s prospects on appeal to be a “twenty-to-one” losing bet.
This news and commentary by A.J. Cooke originally appeared on Valiant News..
