Judge rejects bid to have Arizona governor's election thrown out

A judge tossed a bid by the incoming state Senate majority leader to have the results of the governor’s race thrown out.

Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, had claimed Maricopa County illegally uses computers to review signatures on ballot envelopes.

Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen said Friday that Borrelli waited too long to serve the defendants, including Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, to inform them of the lawsuit and their right to appear in court to defend themselves.

Jantzen also refused to give Borrelli’s attorneys more time to serve those summonses now. He said that, having delayed the matter already, there was no way to resolve the case by the deadlines set in law to deal with election challenges.

The case is not entirely gone.

Jantzen told the attorneys they are free to pursue their claim that Maricopa County is violating state laws about how signatures on ballot envelopes must be reviewed.

But the judge outright rejected a contention by one of Borrelli’s lawyers, Ryan Heath, that an eventual ruling months from now against the county on the issue — even if the judge sided with the senator — would allow him to order Hobbs removed from office.

There was no immediate response from Borrelli.

In the lawsuit filed Monday, Borrelli contended Maricopa County illegally delegated to “an unproven software program’’ run by a private company the required process of comparing ballot signatures to those on file. Early ballots can be counted only if there is a match.

Borrelli also argued that even if a final decision is made by a human, the person is influenced by the preliminary conclusions of the computer about whether there is “high confidence’’ or “low confidence’’ that the signature matches.

Borrelli contended his vote and those of other residents of heavily Republican Mohave County, which does not use signature-verification software, were diluted because of illegal votes being tallied in Maricopa County.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

That, he said, affected the race for governor, where Democrat Hobbs outpolled Republican Kari Lake in Maricopa County by 37,638 votes. Statewide, Hobbs won by 17,117 votes.

Only thing is, Borrelli’s lawyers had still not gotten around to legally informing the defendants — Maricopa County, the Secretary of State’s Office, and Hobbs personally as governor-elect — about the lawsuit when the case came to Jantzen on Friday.

Lawyers Andy Gaona, representing the Secretary of State’s Office, and Alexis Danneman, representing Hobbs, showed up voluntarily on Friday.

But there was no one from the county, whose ballot-review practices are at the heart of the case. Jantzen said it was too late to start the case now, given that state law requires a hearing to be conducted by next Thursday.

He also cited the complexity of Borrelli’s claim.

“Even if this case were to go forward, this is a case that would require expert testimony and expert analysis from both sides for me to make any determination,’’ Jantzen said. “I wouldn’t know what artificial intelligence is and how it works unless I had a lot of things to review and read.’’

All that would take more time than allowed to quickly resolve a simple election challenge, the judge said.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told Capitol Media Services there was no use of computers this year to divide ballots into “high confidence’’ and “low confidence’’ batches of whether the signatures matched.

Richer, a Republican, said Borrelli “didn’t bother asking any of the 100-plus people who worked on signature verification in Maricopa County prior to filing his lawsuit.’’

In tossing out the challenge to Hobbs’ election on Friday, Jantzen did not set a date for Borrelli to pursue the balance of his claim, where he asks the court to declare it illegal to use “unproven and opaque third-party computer software’’ at any point in the signature-validation process.