Ward v. Jackson

Dennis and John "Jack" Wilenchik, a father-son legal team, brought this lawsuit on behalf of Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party. They sued the electors that would cast Arizona's electoral votes for Biden if he were to win the state's election. In the AZ Superior Court for Maricopa County (Phoenix), the Wilenchiks claimed two major election security problems called the election results into question: first, that signatures on the envelopes of mail-in ballots were not adequately verified as belonging to the voter; and second, that the process for handing ballots the counting machine couldn't read left open potential for error. They argued that as a result of these security problems and rumors of misconduct by election workers, "that by reason of erroneous count of votes the person declared elected did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for the office." They called for the court to declare that "the election is annulled and set aside" and, if the audit discovered enough problems, that "the Court declare that the Trump Electors have the highest number of legal votes and declare those persons elected."

What was the process for unreadable ballots? When ballots were received already damaged — if they had gotten wet, or had stains, or had been ripped or tattered, but he voters sent them in anyway — sometimes the counting machines couldn't read them. If so, the writing on the ballots would be reproduced onto new ballots and the new ballots run through the counting machine instead. These ballots are called 'duplicate ballots.'

Judge Randall Warner agreed to let the Wilenchiks' experts compare a randomly chosen sample of the envelope signatures to voter registration files, and a random sample of the damaged ballots to the duplicated ballots created to replace them in order to search for errors. The overall error rate would then be estimated from any errors discovered.

Ultimately, none of the signatures could be declared mismatches, and of 1,626 duplicate ballots examined 9 of them contained errors. At that rate, an estimated 153 of the 27,869 total duplicated ballots in Maricopa County would have contained errors. Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Judge Warner said that cited legal precedent that "One who contests an election has the burden of proving that if illegal votes were cast the illegal votes were sufficient to change the outcome of the election" and ruled that "the duplication process for the presidential election was 99.45% accurate. And there is no evidence that the inaccuracies were intentional or part of a fraudulent scheme. They were mistakes. And given both the small number of duplicate ballots and the low error rate, the evidence does not show any impact on the outcome." The case was dismissed.

Judge Warner's decision was upheld on appeal at the Arizona Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.