On Tuesday, a tweet by Abe Hamadeh pointing out the perils of Election Day voting in Arizona caught the attention of Elon Musk. Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for Attorney General, is currently waging a fight in court to ensure that every single legal vote cast in Arizona’s 2022 General Election is counted.
In April, a judge in Mohave County issued a ruling in Hamadeh’s election challenge against Kris Mayes in the race for Arizona Attorney General, keeping the case alive.
.@ElonMusk correctly (!) weighs in on the #AZAG race, where Republican @AbrahamHamadeh trails by only 280 votes and is respectfully asking a court to allow the remaining votes to be counted.
The margin is razor-thin, and every little discrepancy matters.https://t.co/dqpctPMw1u pic.twitter.com/CIuxMPI810
— Brian Anderson (@AZBrianAnderson) May 2, 2023
As previously reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, Judge Lee Jantzen ordered oral arguments to be held May 16 in Hamadeh’s “motion for a new trial in his battle to show he -not Mayes- would have received the most votes Nov. 8, 2022, if valid ballots had not been rejected and if other ballots had been tabulated properly.”
The race between Mayes and Hamadeh is the closest in the history of Arizona statewide elections, with a mere 280 votes separating the candidates.
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In his tweet, Hamadeh noted, “FYI: Your ballot was 15x more likely to be rejected if you voted on Election Day in Maricopa County.” Musk, the owner of Twitter responded, “Strange.”
Strange indeed say Republican consultants who question why there are some in the party still insisting that Election Day voting is the way to go given all the things that can go wrong, especially in a state like Arizona where the systems to register and vote are generally considered a mess.
In his series of tweets, Hamadeh also called it strange that he, like so many other Arizonans, received multiple ballots for multiple people no longer living at his address.
“Strange that I received three mail-in ballots to my house when I returned from my Army deployment from my former renters who moved out of state,” tweeted Hamadeh. “The numbers presented offer a cautionary tale to Election Day voters until we fix this broken system. Democracy requires transparency.”
In March, a group of veterans decried that broken system when they learned through the work of Hamadeh’s legal team about a veteran, Howard, who had been denied the right to have his vote counted due to failures in the state’s voter registration system and mismanagement at the county recorder level.
“Howard’s service to the nation did not end when he had turned in his driver’s license in exchange for a State ID in 2021 due to the loss of his sight,” wrote combat veterans Sergio Arellano, Robert García, Alexis Jacquez, and Martin Ulises. “He continued to serve his country by dutifully voting in every election, until he was denied that right by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and the bureaucrats for whom he provides cover.”
Because Howard, like so many of his fellow Republicans, exercised his right to vote in person on Election Day, it was too late when he discovered that his vote was never counted because his registration had been erroneously and instantly cancelled by the bureaucrat-created computer system.
As they do with any tweet from Hamadeh, the press pounced and called his initial tweet and Musk’s response to it “disinformation,” and an attempt to sow doubt in elections by “adding suspicion to normal numbers.”
They had no response however, to the numbers Hamadeh offered up in a later tweet in which he showed independent voters were as likely to have their provisional ballots count on Election Day as they were to have them count during the primary election, while Democrats had a better chance of having their provisional ballot count on Election Day, and Republicans were less likely to have their ballots counted on Election Day.
Maricopa County Provisional Ballots:
Accepted
Republican – 1,171 (40%)
Democrat – 834 (29%)
Other – 900 (31%)Rejected
Republican – 2,146 (44%) ⬆️+4%
Democrat – 1,214 (25%) ⬇️ -4%
Other – 1,487 (31%) ↔️ No Change— Abe Hamadeh (@AbrahamHamadeh) May 2, 2023
Too many people struggled to even cast a ballot on Election Day when dozens of laser printers malfunctioned during in-person voting in Maricopa County on Nov. 8. Over one-third of the county’s 223 voting centers experienced malfunctions that eventually led to long lines and some voters being disenfranchised when they could no longer wait in line to vote.
“Reports of sporadic rejection of ballots began shortly after voting started at 6 a.m. The problems continued throughout the day, causing chaos for at least 15,400 voters who could not get their ballot scanned by a tabulator,” according to a report by Terri Jo Neff for the Arizona Daily Independent.
One expert who has something to say about Arizona’s disastrous system is Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State and current Chair of the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute.
“First, Maricopa County election officials blame printers and say they will do better. Common sense and basic competence would dictate election officials assess the capability of the printers BEFORE Election Day. They didn’t,” Blackwell said in a press release.
“Second, it now appears that not all legal ballots were counted and included in the official results. There is testimonial evidence of people who did not have their votes counted. And in a legal case brought by Arizona Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh, evidence shows that then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs knew that the recount showed discrepancies and failed to disclose those relevant facts to the court in a timely manner before the court made its ruling. This failure to do so is either gross incompetence or a cover-up,” concluded Blackwell.