Trump Campaign Admits Arizona Lawsuit Wouldn’t Change Presidential Results

Topline

The Trump campaign said Friday that its lawsuit challenging the vote counting process in Arizona will not affect the presidential race, submitting a court filing notifying the court that the case is now partially moot, ending President Donald Trump’s main legal challenge to the election result in Arizona after the battleground state went narrowly to President-elect Joe Biden.

Key Facts

The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit alleging impropriety by poll workers in Maricopa County, who allegedly submitted voters’ ballots despite the tabulation machine initially showing an error message saying the voter had “overvoted” and selected multiple candidates for a single race, even if they had not.

The campaign alleged in their lawsuit that the issue affected “up to thousands” of voters and would yield “up to thousands of additional votes” for Trump and GOP candidates if fixed—but then admitted in a court hearing Thursday that there were only 191 ballots with overvotes in the presidential race that were at issue in the case, and approximately 961 votes for all federal, state and local races that involve partisan candidates.

The alleged problem may not have even resulted in any voter disenfranchisement, as none of the GOP’s witnesses who testified Friday could actually confirm their votes were not counted.

The Trump campaign said in court Thursday they would only contest the overvoted ballots and ask for them to be recounted if the number of votes was more than the margin between the two candidates in the county.

Maricopa County officials reported Friday that Biden has so far received 11,414 more votes than Trump in the county—with only 10,315 ballots statewide remaining to be counted—meaning that the 191 overvoted ballots would not have any impact on the outcome of the race.

The case could still potentially affect two local races, but the Trump campaign acknowledged that in the case of the presidential race, the vote total has made a ruling “unnecessary.”

Key Background

The Arizona lawsuit was the Trump campaign’s primary post-election lawsuit in Arizona, which multiple outlets have called for Biden, and was filed after the campaign dropped a similar lawsuit that more explicitly centered on a debunked conspiracy theory involving Sharpie markers that bled through ballots. Though the Trump campaign has centered its grievances with the presidential election around false claims of voter fraud—for which there is no evidence to support—the campaign’s legal team explicitly said in court Thursday that the Arizona lawsuit was “not a fraud case, [and] not a ‘steal the election’ case.” The Trump campaign still has a number of other ongoing lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Michigan, whose claims have largely been dismissed by legal experts.

Further Reading

Trump team says vote challenge not about fraud, stealing (AZ Central)

Law Firm Withdraws From Trump Campaign’s Pennsylvania Lawsuit Amid Pressure (Forbes)

Trump’s Strategy To Contest Election Hinges On Claims Of Voter Fraud That Have Already Been Largely Rejected By Courts (Forbes)

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