A GOP proposal that would change the
rules for court challenges of election results in Arizona targets many
of the issues that plagued the 2022 election suits of Republican
candidates Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh.
The legislation would expand the
reasons a person can challenge an election for illegal votes to include
ballots with a broken chain of custody and ballot envelopes with
inconsistent signatures or voter information.
Both of those were central parts of
the legal challenges brought by Lake, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate
who made a failed bid for governor in 2022. In unsuccessful court
challenges aiming to reverse her loss, she claimed that broken chain of
custody for hundreds of thousands of early ballots returned on Election
Day and mismatching signatures on early ballot affidavits rendered enough votes illegal to overturn the results of the election. She lost the race by more than 17,000 votes.
The trial, appeals and Arizona
Supreme courts all threw out Lake’s challenges, with judges finding that
she never proved that any ballots were submitted illegally or that the
signature verification process failed.
House Bill 2472,
sponsored by Rep. Cory McGarr, R-Tucson, would also allow the person or
group that files an election challenge in the courts to physically
examine all ballots, ballot images and early ballot envelopes in that
race, as well as the voters registration records. And even though
election contests are on a fast-tracked schedule, it instructs the
courts to give “ample time” to do so.
In addition, the bill would give all
parties in the suit the right to full discovery of evidence, something
that is currently limited in election challenge cases, because of time
constraints.
“Our courts are not very good at handling election challenges,” said Rep. Justin Heap, a Mesa Republican.
Courts generally operate on a much
slower timeline than is needed to resolve election contests, he said,
adding that this bill is ultimately about extending the time that those
challenging the results of an election have to review evidence.
Hamadeh, who lost the race for
Attorney General to Democrat Kris Mayes by just 280 votes, is still
fighting the results of that race in court. Hamadeh lost his initial challenge
after submitting only 14 ballots — out of 2,600 examined — to the court
that he claimed were erroneously counted or left uncounted. The judge
ultimately ruled that those ballots were only examples of voter error,
but Hamadeh argued that the limits on time and discovery of evidence
stopped his team from finding more ballots that were incorrectly
counted.
Some backers of McGarr’s bill say that Hamadeh’s and Lake’s losses prove nothing.
“If it’s limited to this short
timeline, the case can’t be made — not because it’s invalid, but because
they don’t have time,” Heap said.
Election challenges have an
abbreviated timeline compared to other court cases to ensure that the
true winner of a race is the one who takes office. Lake’s initial
challenge to the results of the 2022 governor’s race was decided Dec. 24, 2022. Her opponent, Katie Hobbs was sworn in as governor Jan. 2, 2023.
McGarr’s bill also proposes sending
appeals in election challenges directly to the Arizona Supreme Court,
bypassing the appeals courts, and would require the Supreme Court to
quickly hear and decide the case.
Ousted former Republican state Rep.
Liz Harris spoke in favor of the bill during a House Municipal Oversight
and Elections Committee meeting on Wednesday.
Harris was kicked out of the House
last year in a bipartisan vote after she invited a woman to present in
front of a joint meeting of the Senate and House elections committees who falsely accused numerous lawmakers of being in the pocket of Mexican drug cartels and being involved in a fraudulent housing deed scheme.
“This might be a Republican issue
today, but it might be a Democrat issue a few years from now,” Harris
said. “This is really a bipartisan bill.”
She asked the lawmakers to amend the
bill to also allow all parties in election suits to examine digital
files from the tabulators that counted the votes, all precinct ballot
reports and an unmodified copy of the cast-vote record.
Kerry Jackson, a member of the public, asked the lawmakers to vote against the bill.
“I don’t trust this bill,” he said,
adding that he’s watched members of the Elections Committee spread false
and unfounded claims. “I do not trust y’all with this bill.”
Ruthee Goldkorn, a disability rights
activist, told the lawmakers that this bill was just another attempt to
sow distrust and distress among the voters and to disrupt democracy,
adding that people with disabilities might have ballot envelope
signatures that seem suspect because they differ greatly from day to
day.
Rep. Rachel Jones, R-Tucson, said the bill should garner bipartisan support since some Democrats claimed
that Donald Trump didn’t win the race for president in 2016. Trump lost
the popular vote that year but narrowly won the Electoral College tally
because he won in several tightly contested battleground states.
She added that she found it “so
frustrating” that people tell her fraud didn’t occur in the 2020 and
2022 elections, simply because fraud was never proven in court. Dozens
of courts nationwide evaluated fraud claims related to those elections
and rejected all of them because litigants could not provide any
evidence.
Members of the committee ultimately
approved the bill on a 5-4 vote, along party lines. It will next head to
the full House of Representatives.
Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, chided those who don’t believe in election fraud.
“These days, I feel like I’m living
in the Orwellian world,” he said. “We trust our election officials. They
would never put their thumb on the scale. They would never try to
cheat. Well, we know that’s demonstrably false, and it’s demonstrably
false in the way a 6th grader could know that it’s demonstrably false.”
His proof is that election officials
in Maine and Colorado took former President Donald Trump off the primary
ballot in their states on the grounds that he is ineligible to serve
under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because he incited an
insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. (Colorado’s secretary of state actually
permitted Trump to run for president, but that state’s Supreme Court
ruled he was barred from the ballot.)
“Are they willing to disenfranchise
you?” Kolodin asked. “Yes. They’ve done it in public. Before, they were
trying to do it in private. Now, they’re willing to do it in public.”