Dem
51
GOP
49
Losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) filed a lawsuit to try to get her loss overturned or have a new election. Her main argument was "I don't like losing." We noted last week that the judge threw eight of her 10 claims out without even hearing them since that were so absurd. For the other two, he was willing to bring them to trial.
The trial lasted 2 days and is now over. The judge asked for evidence that Maricopa County messed up the election. There were some problems with a few printers, but no voter was denied the chance to vote as a result and all votes were ultimately counted. Several witnesses testified that a small number of printed ballot images were 5% too small and that could happen only if the settings were intentionally wrong. County officials vigorously denied that. It is possible that heat from the printers caused the malfunctions, but that is still under investigation.
Lake's lawyers called on Richard Baris, of the conservative firm Big Data Poll, to discuss the exit polling he did. He said the errors were big enough to change the results. The lawyer for defendant and governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D) noted that FiveThirtyEight bans Big Data Poll because it doesn't believe their polls. We're jealous. We also ban them. They could have cited us, too.
In any event, the judge was not impressed by Lake's case and ruled in favor of Hobbs on Saturday.
Meanwhile, on Friday, in a different case, a different judge ruled against Arizona AG candidate Abe Hamadeh (R), who is trailing Kristin Mayes (D) by 511 votes out of 2.5 million. State law requires a recount in such cases, but it is not complete yet. So it seems the new Republican strategy of "always claim victory and sue if you lose" doesn't seem to be convincing the judges. (V)