Unanimously spiking a Republican contest, the Supreme Court of Arizona confirmed the election of President-elect Joe Biden’s electors after finding no evidence of fraud in the state.
“The Court concludes, unanimously, that the trial judge did not abuse his discretion in denying the request to continue the hearing and permit additional inspection of the ballots,” the court’s Chief Justice Robert M. Brutinel wrote for a seven-member panel.
The court pointedly noted that a “hand count audit revealed no discrepancies in the tabulation of votes and the statistically negligible error” before hand-waving the grievances of outgoing President Donald Trump’s loyalists.
“Because the challenge fails to present any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden Electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,’ let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results, the Court need not decide if the challenge was in fact authorized under A.R.S. § 16-672 or if the federal ‘safe harbor’ deadline applies to this contest,” the ruling continued, referring to the state’s code for challenging an election on the grounds of misconduct.
Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs certified the election results with a 1,672,143- to 1,661,686-vote margin, with Biden claiming victory by more than 10,000 ballots.
The lead GOP challenger, Kelli Ward, also signed up as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit dubbed a “Kraken” case by Sidney Powell, who lost two of her other cases in Michigan and Georgia on Monday.
With a federal judge’s ruling in Arizona expected on Wednesday, attorneys for the Grand Canyon State’s Maricopa County informed the court of their recent victory.
Maricopa County made sure to alert U.S. District Judge Diane Joyce Humetewa that Arizona’s highest court found “no misconduct or illegal votes,” as well as the overlap with plaintiffs.
Read the seven-page ruling below:
[Image via Alex Wong/Getty Images]