Arizona Republican AG candidate’s election lawsuit dismissed by judge as premature

By Gilbert E. On Nov 30, 2022

Arizona Republican AG candidate’s election: Tuesday, a state judge threw out Abraham Hamadeh’s lawsuit challenging this month’s election, saying it was filed too early. Hamadeh was running for attorney general as a Republican in Arizona. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner said Hamadeh and the Republican National Committee, which joined the suit, cannot file an election contest until after Arizona certifies the election, currently scheduled for Monday.

Hamadeh’s Democratic opponent is ahead of him by just 510 votes out of more than 2.5 million ballots before an automatic recount. Hamadeh said that malfunctions in Arizona’s most populous county and other places changed the results, so the tabulations should be changed and he should be called the winner.

Warner’s order, which didn’t look at the truth of the claims, says that Hamadeh can file the lawsuit again as soon as state officials certify the election. This means that he doesn’t have to wait for the recount to be done.

“According to these laws, there can be no election contest until the results have been counted and announced, because until then, no one has been “declared elected.” “There is no question that the results of the November 2022 election have not been counted and announced,” Warner wrote.

Erica Knight, a spokeswoman for Hamadeh, said he will refile the case after the statewide canvass. Knight said, “The case is still valid on its own terms.” This year, Hamadeh’s lawsuit is one of several that Republicans have filed against Arizona’s elections. GOP leaders have used the fact that printers broke down on Election Day in Maricopa County, which has about 60% of Arizona’s population and includes the Phoenix area, to say that voters there were denied their right to vote.

County officials have admitted that the problems happened, but they insist that voters who were affected could use one of several back-up options.

The state’s GOP and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs, asked for a delay, but the county’s Republican-controlled board approved the vote count on Monday.

In court documents, Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state, criticized Hamadeh’s lawsuit. She pointed out that there were problems with the way it was done, but she also said that the lawsuit was trying to “go against the will of the people.”

“An election challenge must be based on facts known to the plaintiffs at the time the challenge is filed, not on wild guesses meant to hurt the work of Arizona’s election officials,” Hobbs’s lawyers wrote. Kris Mayes, who ran against Hamadeh on the Democratic ticket, was also against his lawsuit. She called it a “fishing expedition” that was meant to hurt Arizona’s election. All but one of Arizona’s 15 counties certified before Monday’s statutory deadline.

Supervisors in the Republican-leaning Cochise County voted to defy the deadline, quickly sparking two legal challenges from Hobbs and progressive election lawyer Marc Elias.

Under Arizona law, state officials must certify the election on Monday, unless they don’t get a certified canvass from a county. If Cochise County doesn’t certify, state officials would have until Dec. 8 to move forward without counting votes from the county.

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