In a blow to Arizona candidates who are contesting their bids to overturn losses in the November 2022 election, Maricopa County Judge Melissa Iyer Julian ruled against Republican Mark Finchem, who claimed county officials did not properly safeguard the integrity of the election.
Judge Julian levied sanctions on Finchem for presenting election malfeasance allegations in “bad faith.”
The Maricopa judge ruled that the evidence presented in Finchem’s complaints led her to believe he did not present his claims in “good faith.”
An excerpt from Julian’s ruling reads: “Attached to Finchem’s Amended Statement was his own expert’s analysis of the alleged failure to count so-called ‘black box votes.’ Finchem’s expert report identified 80,000 potentially ‘missing votes.'”
The ruling continued: “Yet, Finchem lost the election he challenged by 120,208 votes. That margin was so significant that even if it were assumed that 80,000 votes were missing and that those votes would all have been cast in his favor, the result of the election would not have changed.”
According to an MSN report, Julian concluded that Finchem must now reimburse Arizona Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes for “reasonable attorneys’ fees” incurred while responding to Finchem’s charges.
Meanwhile, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed to expedite a hearing involving GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who also is contesting the results of the 2022 election — alleging a breach of election integrity.
According to Conservative Brief, Lake’s attorneys argued that the Maricopa County Superior Court and Arizona Court of Appeals disregarded evidence and “ignored … precedents for reviewing election contests and Arizona’s ballot chain-of-custody (“COC”) and logic and accuracy testing (‘L&A testing’) requirements set forth in Arizona’s Election Procedures Manual (‘EPM’), and A.R.S. §§16-621(E), 16-449, 16-452(C).”
Criticizing an opinion of a lower court, Lake’s attorneys said: “The court of appeals’ Opinion denying petitioner Kari Lake’s appeal indicates that Arizona election laws don’t matter.”
The high court will hear Lake’s case on March 21.
The ruling upholding Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ reads:
Lake’s arguments fail…because these claims were expressly premised on an allegation of official misconduct in the form of interference with on-site tabulators — the same alleged misconduct as in Lake’s printer/tabulator claim.
Because these claims were duplicative of a claim that Lake unsuccessfully pursued at trial, the superior court did not err by dismissing them. For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the superior court’s ruling confirming Hobbs’s election as governor. We deny Hobbs’s request for an award of attorney’s fees on appeal because she offered no substantive basis for the award.
Evidence ultimately supports the conclusion that voters were able to cast their ballots, that votes were counted correctly, and that no other basis justifies the election results.
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