President Trump’s campaign abandoned its attempt to find more votes for the president in Arizona through a lawsuit concerning about 191 ballots that it wanted to be reviewed.
The move on Friday comes one day after a six-hour court hearing about the case and after additional ballots tabulated Thursday made it clear that the campaign’s request would be inconsequential to final presidential election results in the state.
“Since the close of yesterday’s hearing, the tabulation of votes statewide has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors,” attorney for the Trump campaign, Kory Langhofer, said in a notice of partial mootness about the lawsuit filed Friday.
What started as a lawsuit based on a now-debunked theory that bleed-through from Sharpie markers caused widespread tabulation errors in how ballots were counted in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, turned into a narrowly-focused case about a small number of ballots.
At issue was whether some in-person Election Day voters’ ballots were improperly pushed through a tabulation machine by pressing a “green button” after being flagged as having a problem. The green-button direction processed ballots that had an “overvote,” when a selection was made for multiple candidates in a contest rather than just one, causing no vote to be recorded for that contest.
The Trump campaign’s lawyer requested that if the canvass results of any state race end up being larger than the margin of the leading candidate that the overvote ballots be allowed to be inspected and checked to ensure that votes for president were correctly tabulated.
At the time of Thursday’s hearing, only 191 ballots in Maricopa County had been recorded as overvotes in the presidential contest.
A Thursday night ballot posting in Arizona expanded President-elect Joe Biden’s lead over Trump to 11,434 votes. The secretary of state’s office estimates that 10,315 ballots have yet to be counted, meaning that even if Trump won every one of the 10,315 ballots, Biden’s lead would sit at 1,119 — well above the 191-vote margin for the lawsuit to matter in the race.
Lanhghofer, in the Thursday hearing, called the lawsuit a “relatively boring an anodyne case about the proper procedures being followed.”
