President Trump says that the 2020 election was “stolen” as his supporters cry “stop the steal” at protests across the country, alleging widespread election fraud.
But a lawyer representing Trump’s campaign rejected that argument when it comes to the legal complaints about ballot tabulation in Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona.
“This is not a fraud case. It is not a stealing-the-election case,” said Kory Langhofer, the lawyer representing the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party, in a six-hour court hearing on Thursday. He called the case a “relatively boring an anodyne case about the proper procedures being followed.”
In another comment, Langhofer echoed concerns of Democrats warning that Trump’s allegation of widespread fraud is harmful to the democratic system of the United States.
“The words we use here have real effects in the real world and the confidence in our public systems,” Langhofer said. “I just want to be very clear on the record about what we’re talking about here and what we are not.”
What started as a lawsuit based on a now-debunked theory that bleed-through from Sharpie markers caused tabulation errors in how ballots in Maricopa County has turned into a narrowly focused case about a small number of ballots (191 so far) unlikely to make a difference in the presidential election results in the Grand Canyon State.
At issue in the case is whether some in-person Election Day voters’ ballots were improperly pushed through a tabulation machine after being flagged as having a problem. Trump’s legal team presented several witnesses at the hearing who said that a poll worker pushed, or they were instructed to push, a “green button” that caused the ballot to be accepted.
The green-button direction would process votes that had an “overvote” in which the machine found that a selection was made for multiple candidates in a contest rather than just one, causing no vote to be recorded for that candidate. The witnesses testified that they were instructed or pushed the green button despite not having selected multiple candidates in any race. After reading more information online, they question whether their votes counted.
Langhofer’s request to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Kiley was that if the results of any statewide 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.
That marks a much narrower argument than the original aim of the lawsuit about widespread systemic errors.
“The plaintiffs in this case have zigzagged wildly all over the place,” said Sarah Gonski, a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. “We have live evidence today that’s been about a worker error and green button. We have affidavits that are about bleed-through and Sharpies. Their briefs are apparently about a theory that overvoted ballots are equivalent to defective or damaged ballots.”
Furthermore, there are only 191 overvotes in Maricopa County in the presidential race so far. Because Democratic President-elect Joe Biden leads by about 12,000 votes in the state, and outstanding ballots are unlikely to significantly narrow that margin, the issue of overvotes in the county is unlikely to affect the overall outcome of the race.
Lawyers for Maricopa County and Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs also noted that none of the voter witnesses said that their specific ballots had overvotes despite having to press the green button to push their ballots through. They also argued that Arizona law does not provide a mechanism to accommodate the Trump campaign’s request.
Parts of the hearing proved messy for the Trump campaign’s argument.
Kiley rejected the request of the Trump campaign’s lawyers to admit additional descriptions from voters about green-button issues submitted on a Republican website created to collect green-button complaints.
“The fact that your process for obtaining these affidavits yielded affidavits that you yourself found to be false does not support a finding that this process generates reliable evidence,” Kiley said. “This is concerning.”
One expert witness for the Trump campaign testifying about the security of the election website, Zack Alcoyne, was shown on cross-examination to be a business partner of the lead lawyer for the Trump campaign, Langhofer.
Kiley ended the hearing without issuing a ruling, saying that he would take the testimony under advisement.
