Comment PHOENIX — Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, sued his Democratic challenger and a wide range of state and county officials on Tuesday in an attempt to block his loss from being certified and force them to declare him the winner In November. 8 competition. His race, in which he trailed Democrat Chris Mayes by just 510 votes out of more than 2.5 million delegates, was already headed for a mandatory recount, which is triggered when 0.5% does not separate the two candidates. Hamadeh argued that the election was mishandled in a way that made a difference to the outcome. The Washington Post has not predicted a winner in the race. The state tally gave 1,254,102 votes to Hamadeh and 1,254,612 to Mayes, who earlier Tuesday said she felt “confident the final result will be the same” and predicted the process would be completed by Christmas. “As this race should show everyone across the country, every vote counts,” he told reporters. Republican disaffected candidates lost key statewide races in the 2022 midterm elections, even as the disaffected ranks swelled in Congress. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post) With Republican candidates falling to Democrats in the state’s most critical contests, the slim margin in the attorney general race has taken center stage. The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer for state government, with the power to enforce election laws that could affect the administration of the 2024 presidential election. The attorney general also has broad investigative powers, which the current attorney general, Republican Mark Brnovich, has wielded against local officials and their administration in the 2020 presidential election. The Republican National Committee joined Hamadeh, a former U.S. attorney and Army chief, in his lawsuit, which was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court. The defendants include Mayes, former chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates public utilities, and Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state and governor-elect, in addition to county recorders and boards of supervisors in all 15 Arizona counties . . The lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction preventing the secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asking her to declare Hamadeh the winner. He is also asking the court to order the various county officials to correct the procedural and classification errors he claims they made and to amend the final vote count, which he claims will make the Republican the winner. Dan Barr, an attorney for Mayes, said the Democrat will ask the court to dismiss the complaint, which he called “bereft of facts.” “He doesn’t plausibly allege that mistakes were made in the administration of the election, and if they were, they would have made any difference to the outcome,” Barr said. A spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said the office’s legal counsel is reviewing the lawsuit and preparing a response. “The Bureau believes the lawsuit is legally unfounded and speculative,” the spokesman said in a statement to the Washington Post. “None of the allegations raised warrants the emergency remedy of altering the election results and subverting the will of the voters of Arizona.” Notably, Hamadeh’s lawsuit begins with a statement that he and the RNC “do not allege fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing with this lawsuit.” It is specifically focused on the attorney general race, not other statewide contests, such as the governor’s race, in which Republican Cary Lake has refused to concede. The margin separating her from Hobbs is well outside the margin for an automatic recount. However, Lake’s campaign argued that the results should not be certified, pledging that “justice will be served for the people of Arizona.” Counties must certify results by Nov. 28, and state certification is set for Dec. 5. Lake has not gone to court, as Hamadeh has now, beyond seeking to compel Maricopa County to produce extensive records about its administration of the Nov. 8 election. But her insistence that she was cheated out of victory makes her unique among Republican candidates backed by former President Donald Trump, nearly all of whom have conceded this cycle despite signaling their support for false allegations of fraud in his contest 2020. Lake’s stance ensures that Arizona remains central ground in the fight for voting and election loyalty. Both Lake and Hamadeh — she in public statements, he now in court — have focused on engineering problems in Maricopa County, where Phoenix and more than half of the state’s voters live. Beginning early on Election Day, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling places produced ballots with ink that was too light for vote-counting machines to read, county officials said. That forced voters to wait in line, travel to another location or deposit their ballots in secure boxes that were transported to downtown Phoenix and counted there. County leaders have yet to explain what caused the problems, saying they will conduct a comprehensive review once the ballots are sorted. However, they argue that no one was disenfranchised. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge reached the same conclusion in denying a Republican request to extend voting hours on Election Day because of the mechanical errors. Hamadeh’s lawsuit asks the court to require Maricopa County to process and record 146 provisional ballots and 273 mail-in ballots he claims were Improperly excluded when voters failed to check out of a polling station after experiencing mechanical problems, thereby preventing them from voting in a different way. A Maricopa County spokesman declined to comment Tuesday. The lawsuit also asks the court to order the various counties to fix what it claims were problems with ballot copying and inaccurate ballot judging and to disqualify ballots with improperly matched signatures. The lawsuit did not provide evidence of widespread wrongdoing sufficient to prejudice the outcome. Jim Burton, a Democratic election law attorney in metro Phoenix, said the lawsuit doesn’t list enough specific problems to change the outcome of the election. “If you’re going to run for election, you have to be specific and you have to specifically identify enough issues that will swing the election,” Barton said. “They haven’t met the standard of showing that if they were right, the results of the election would have changed.” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the lawsuit appears deliberately different from others aimed at overturning election results in recent years. Mainly, it steers clear of “the kinds of wild allegations of fraud that we’ve seen in some of the Trump-related lawsuits in 2020,” he said. The goal, Hasen said, is to “probably get the court to take it seriously.”
