Trump’s Sore Loser Ticket Of Election Deniers File Election Challenges

It is becoming a holiday tradition for sore loser Republicans to file meritless election challenges for their fascist wet dreams of overturning election results and simply declaring them the winner. Nowhere is this sickness worse than right here in Arizona. This new holiday tradition sucks and has to end.

This headline pretty much tells you everything you need to know, Cyber Ninjas lawyer, Trump attorney file election contest for Lake:

In a wide-ranging lawsuit filed on Friday afternoon, attorneys for former Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake asked a Maricopa County judge to throw out the results of her election loss. The election contest lawsuit asks the court to declare Lake the winner – or order a new election.

Asking for remedies that the law does not provide. The Court has no power to order a new election. Period.

The case makes a stunningly broad range of claims – from [weaponized] First Amendment free speech violations relating to social media [irrelevant]; to Fourteenth Amendment equal protection violations; to claims that Arizona’s election processes are unconstitutional.

“The number of illegal votes cast in Arizona’s general election on November 8, 2022, far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin between … Kari Lake and Democrat(ic) gubernatorial candidate Secretary of State Katie Hobbs … hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected the election in Maricopa County,” Lake’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.

That’s a bold assertion without any evidence. By “illegal” votes I assume she means “Democratic” votes, because in the MAGA/QAnon cult, only their votes are legitimate, thus by definition Democratic votes are illegitimate. Kari Lake seeks to overturn her election loss citing ‘intentional misconduct,’ but provides no evidence: “Lake’s lawsuit contains little evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead almost entirely on statements from poll workers and [Cleta Mitchell’s] “poll observers,” as well as analyses by partisan actors.”

“This case is about restoring trust in the election process – a trust that Maricopa County election officials and Hobbs have shattered. The judicial system is now the only vehicle by which that trust can be restored,” the lawyers added.

In at least one instance, the lawsuit even made allegations of wrongdoing in Arizona’s 2020 election – a claim that was at the heart of Lake’s gubernatorial campaign.

“The invalid-signature ballot envelopes established in the Busch and Parikh declarations demonstrate that Maricopa County’s elections suffered from (an) outcome-determinative number of illegal votes in 2020 and 2022,” Lake’s attorneys wrote.

“If the process was illegitimate then so are the results,” Lake wrote in a Tweet announcing the lawsuit. She had long teased the lawsuit and said last month that she had “assembled the best and brightest legal team.”

The case was filed by Bryan Blehm, an Arizona attorney best known for representing the Cyber Ninjas in cases related to the partisan audit of Arizona’s 2020 election, and Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has worked with former President Donald Trump and spoke to Trump on the phone multiple times on Jan. 6, 2021. [The January 6 Committee still wants to depose him.]

But wait! There’s more!

Fake cowboy and Coup Plotter insurrectionist Mark Finchem has also filed n election challenge. Mark Finchem files lawsuit challenging election results:

Republican Arizona Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem – and Congressional candidate Jeff Zink – filed a lawsuit Friday to overturn the results of the November election.

The lawsuit filed by @RealMarkFinchem is…well, it's a lawsuit.

All one needs to know is the co-plaintiff Jeff Zink lost to @RubenGallego by 54 points.

That's how pervasive they believe election fraud is. pic.twitter.com/6fGDGBZgs7

— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) December 10, 2022

So the attorney who tried to move Cochise County's lawsuit about machine certification to the (non-existent) U.S. District Court's Eastern Division is now representing @RealMarkFinchem and Jeff Zink in their election challenge.

— Mary Jo Pitzl (@maryjpitzl) December 10, 2022

Their lawsuit is against current Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Finchem’s secretary of state opponent, Democrat Adrian Fontes and Zink’s opponent in Congressional District 3, Rep. Ruben Gallego.

The lawsuit claims that Maricopa County “failed miserably” in holding a fair and secure election, mostly focusing on technical issues at some polling locations.

On Election Day, roughly 31% of polling places faced printer issues that caused some tabulators to not be able to read the ballots. However, those issues were fixed on the same day that they occurred and even at the height of the problems, voters had other options available.

Voters were also able to cast their ballot in the on-site “Box 3” drop-off. Despite Finchem’s claim that “these black box votes were likely never counted,” Maricopa County has used this method for decades without evidence of widespread failure.

Finchem also attacked governor-elect Katie Hobbs for not recusing herself of her duties as secretary of state during the election. The lawsuit claimed that “recusal would cause her to lose control of the election she hoped to directly benefit from.”

What the lawsuit doesn’t mention is that it’s standard for election officials to maintain their position while running for a higher office. In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp won the 2018 gubernatorial race that he oversaw, the Associated Press reported.

The lawsuit’s introduction closes by referring to the results of Arizona’s 2022 election as a “comical and tragic outcome.” Although the suit doesn’t ask that Finchem be declared the winner of his race, it demands that the vote be “nullified and redone.”

At this time, it remains to be seen how far this suit will go in Arizona’s courts. [Not far.]

But wait! There’s more!

Mr. “Premature litigation” (I believe there’s a pill for that) Abe Hamadeh is back to try again, even before the automatic recount in his race has been conducted. (The machine recount began on December 7, the hand count recount began on December 10. The process is due to be competed by December 22 when a judge will reveal the results of the recount in a court hearing.) Abe Hamadeh challenges election results, says election issues across the state cost him the race:

Republican Abe Hamadeh, who lost the office of attorney general by just 511 votes, filed a lawsuit against election officials across the state, claiming, without proof, that a combination of uncounted votes for him and illegal votes for his opponent cost him the election.

“At 511 votes out of 2.5 million, our race is the closest statewide race in Arizona history,” he tweeted. “Every legal vote deserves to be counted.”

The new lawsuit asks the court to stop the recount, overturn the certified statewide canvass and order all 15 counties to reexamine their results, making sure to include what Hamadeh claims are unlawfully rejected votes and exclude allegedly illegal ballots. By doing so, attorneys for Hamadeh and the Republican National Committee claim, the results will show that the true winner of the office of attorney general is Hamadeh and not Democrat Kris Mayes.

“The December 5 canvass and its constituent county canvasses are afflicted by election board misconduct, the tallying of unlawful ballots, the failure to count lawful ballots, and the erroneous counting of votes,” wrote Hamadeh’s attorney, Tim La Sota. “A complete and correct tabulation of all lawful ballots will establish that Contestant Hamadeh received the highest number of votes for the office of Arizona Attorney General.”

The lawsuit alleges that issues with on-demand printers in Maricopa County effectively disenfranchised hundreds of voters — a number which could prove pivotal in flipping the race.

Hamadeh’s lawsuit alleges that as many as 395 voters were not checked out properly due to poll worker error and later cast provisional ballots, which were not counted, or had their ballots voided because they were logged in the system as having already voted. An unknown amount, attorneys add, were prevented from voting altogether once they reached a second site after not checking out of the first.

No evidence was given to substantiate these claims. 

Provisional ballots also came under fire. The lawsuit claims that as many as 1,942 provisional ballots in Maricopa County alone were left uncounted after voters were determined not to be registered to vote, despite having been able to vote in previous elections. [Likely due to our GQP legislature’s Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression measures. They managed to suppress their one voters! Karma, baby!] Every voter in Maricopa County whose provisional ballot was rejected should be given a chance to have their vote counted, the lawsuit demands.

La Sota further claims that adjudicated and duplicated ballots resulted in incorrectly counted votes. Adjudication is the process by which a voter’s intent is determined by a panel of election officials when that intent is unclear, due to legibility issues. Likewise, a duplicated ballot is created when the original was too physically mangled to preserve the voter’s original choices.

The lawsuit requests that all undervoted ballots in every county be made available for examination, to determine that no votes for Hamadeh were unduly lost. An undervote can occur when a voter makes no selection in a contest which requires at least one choice, as in the race for attorney general, in which only one candidate can be voted for.

And Mayes benefitted from “illegal “votes, according to the lawsuit. Early ballots include an affidavit which a voter must sign before mailing or dropping the ballot off. Election officials count those votes only after verifying the signatures match signatures on file in the voter’s registration record.

Numerous early ballots this election were accepted with signatures that didn’t match the ones on a voter’s registration, but rather other election documents, such as an affidavit filled out in a previous year, Hamadeh claims. [Signatures vary over time – this is GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression tactic.]

However, that is normal election policy, and is allowed by state law. Republican legislators amended that law several years ago to explicitly allow the use of election files beyond a voter’s registration to verify signatures. Doh!

So many corrupt Republican lawyers who need to face bar discipline for these “election denier” lawsuits. They are repeat offenders. Stop them before they can do it again.

Finally, it looks like Peter Thiel puppet Blake Masters failed to file an election challenge before the deadline. Good for him?

But Blake Masters, second only to Hershel Waker for the worst senate candidate in the country, has been asked by the RNC to participate in a post-election “autopsy” of the GQP’s 2022 failures by the RNC. No seriously, this is not a joke.

Laurie Roberts of The Republic recently wrote, RNC looks to Blake Masters for advice on how to win? Sure, that makes sense:

The Republican National Committee has sent out a search party to dive deep and figure out whatever happened to that long-awaited, oft-touted red tsunami that was supposed to engulf the country earlier this month.

Among those tapped to help the party regain its mojo: Blake Masters.

No, really.

Politico reports that RNC has tapped nearly a dozen outside Republican advisersfrom across the country to review the party’s poor performance in the midterm elections and help “chart a winning course in the years to come.”As RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel put it, to figure out “where the party excelled and where we need to improve, especially in the clear underperformance among independent voters that we saw … and offer ideas as to how we do better in the future.”

So naturally, the party is looking to the guy who was at the top of the Republican ticket in Arizona yet attracted fewer voters than any other Republican candidate in the six major statewide races.

Blake Masters knows how to woo women, minorities?

Politico reports party leaders are hoping the new Republican Party Advisory Council, as it’s being called, will help with outreach to minority voters and suburban women.

And they chose Masters, a guy who blamed our nation’s epidemic of gun violenceon Black people.

A guy who promoted the “Great Replacement” theory so popular with white supremacists who run around warning about a plot to replace white Americans with non-white people.A guy who early in his campaign called for a national ban on abortion.It’s understandable that the RNC would look for advice on how to regain their long-solid control of Arizona, a swing state in which Democrats swept all the major races this year.

But the selection of Masters makes me wonder if the Republican Party is serious about a party reboot.

C’mon Laurie, you know they are not serious. Every two years the answer is always the same: “We need to double-down on the crazy. Yeah, that’s the ticket!” Now that MAGA/QAnon election deniers have been elected to office across the country – the Arizona legislature is crawling with these MAGAts – you ain’t seen nothing yet. They will be dialing up the crazy to eleven.