Trump Campaign v. Hobbs

Kory Langhofer and Thomas Basile of the law firm Statecraft filed this lawsuit on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign and the Arizona and national Republican Party. In it, they alleged that electronic vote tabulators (counting machines) sometimes misread correctly filled-in ballots in such a way that it mislabeled them as overvotes. Specifically, they alleged that if voters used Sharpies to fill in their ballots, then the machines could read their marks through the cardstock and would mistakenly indicate that they had voted for two different people in the same election. That is called an overvote. Overvote ballots are disregarded, which means these votes wouldn't be counted. Election workers were supposed to manually check all overvotes to see if the intention of the voter was clear so that the vote could be counted, but plaintiffs claim that this manual check never happened. Counting these ballots correctly "would yield up to thousands of additional votes for President Trump and other Republican candidates" according to these Trump campaign lawyers.

An evidentiary hearing was scheduled. At the hearing, legal arguments from the defense managed to get 2 of the plaintiffs' 14 exhibits of evidence declared inadmissible. The plaintiffs brought in only 8 of their 23 witnesses to testify. Their testimony provided the basis to admit 10 of the defense's 13 exhibits of evidence, but no basis to admit the plaintiffs' own evidence. The defense then called 2 witnesses, which brought in 2 more of their exhibits. Finally, all parties rested their cases with the final remaining defense exhibit never admitted. Judge Daniel Kiley said he would consider defendants' motions to dismiss, and closed the hearing.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs submitted a report on the progress so far of the counting of the votes. So far, only 191 overvotes were identified statewide, only 10,315 ballots remained to be counted, and Biden was leading Trump in the official vote count by 11,414 votes. (In the final and official tally, Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes in Arizona.) Trump's lawyers admitted that this made it impossible for their allegations, even if true, to have overturned the Presidential election results, but argued that it still may be possible for some local elections to have been overturned.

The next morning, everyone met in court again to discuss whether there was any case left. Prosecutors had not been able to get most of their evidence admitted, and the central issue of the case had been rendered moot. After some debate between the two sides, the judge granted the motions to dismiss the case. The Republicans' lawyers did not appeal the decision.