The Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court received an emergency petition Saturday from 11 Republicans who still hope Arizona’s electoral votes will be credited to President Donald Trump, even though the U.S. Electoral College is slated to meet Monday.
The petition had not been docketed as of Saturday night, but similar election cases have been addressed by the justices in a few days.
The Republican plaintiffs, which include Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, State Rep. Anthony Kern, and Greg Safsten, the executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, contend “a massive election fraud” resulted in former Vice President Joe Biden’s 10,457 vote victory in Arizona. Last week, a federal judge in Phoenix dismissed the Republicans’ challenge to the Nov. 30 certification of Arizona’s election results.
“They want to make sure that every legal vote is counted and no illegal vote ever is,” Kolodin said.
The result of the dismissal by U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa is that Arizona’s 11 electoral votes are currently slated to be cast for Biden on Dec. 14 unless the U.S. Supreme Court issues an order to the contrary.
Whether the justices can or will take up the case by then is unknown. But they will have Humetewa’s case file and her Dec. 9 ruling in which she said the 11 Republican plaintiffs did not have legal standing to challenge the election results.
Humetewa also ruled the plaintiffs’ Dec. 2 request to prohibit Arizona’s electoral votes from being cast was not supported by credible evidence of the “fraud, illegality and statistical impossibility” alleged in the Republicans’ lawsuit.
“The allegations they put forth to support their claims of fraud fail in their particularity and plausibility,” the judge ruled. “Because the Complaint is grounded in these fraud allegations, the Complaint shall be dismissed.”
Humetewa’s ruling meant several attorneys representing the plaintiffs -including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood- were denied an evidentiary hearing at which they could have put forth sworn testimony and exhibits about the violations of Arizona’s elections laws they claim deprived Trump a victory.
Powell recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an election challenge out of Michigan, while Lin filed an emergency petition last week related to Georgia’s election result. They are working the Arizona case with Phoenix-based attorney Alex Kolodin.
One issue facing the plaintiffs was the expedited nature of election challenges, Kolodin told Arizona Daily Independent. “What normally takes months in a non-election case must be conducted in a matter of days with an election case,” he said.
Yet despite the lack of success by several other election challenges in Arizona, Kolodin said his clients are committed to exhausting their options to expose the alleged “multifaceted schemes and artifices implemented by Defendants and their collaborators…in the unlawful counting, or fabrication, of hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious ballots in the State of Arizona, that collectively add up to multiples of Biden’s purported lead in the State of 10,457 votes.”
That’s why a notice of appeal was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit the day after Humetewa’s decision. But that was replaced Saturday with an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“They want to make sure that every legal vote is counted and no illegal vote ever is,” Kolodin said. “They were disappointed that Judge Humetewa did not allow an evidentiary hearing, but unfortunately there was not time to get U.S. Supreme Court review of that mistaken decision with a detour through the 9th Circuit.”