We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), a leading election integrity group in Arizona, has been looking into ballots that were not counted in Arizona’s 2022 election. Co-founder Shelby Busch issued a video last week revealing that the group found hundreds of instances involving people who said they voted for Abe Hamadeh but their ballots were not counted – more than the 280 votes he lost the attorney general’s race by. However, Busch told The Arizona Sun Times that the courts refuse to consider the new evidence.
Busch said in the video, “Abe Hamadeh won the attorney general’s race. I’m going to outline for you the evidence behind how Kris Mayes was installed as the illegitimate attorney general. … Our evidence in Abe’s case shows that thousands of Arizona voters were disenfranchised on Election Day in violation of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, and Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state and the counties know about these voters and have done nothing to correct it.”
She said what is different about Hamadeh’s election challenge compared to most others is he is asking judges to count votes from disenfranchised voters, not throw votes out. The latter causes complaints about disenfranchising voters, so judges are hesitant to comply.
Busch (pictured here) played a clip from Maricopa County officials discussing that when voters registered a vehicle with Service Arizona, if the vehicle was registered in another county, the voter’s registration was automatically changed to that county unless they noticed and unchecked a box on the form.
She said the rejection rates for ballots in every county in Arizona in the 2022 election increased, some significantly. “Some of the county’s rejection rates increased 10,000 percent, with the smaller counties going from .09 percent of the overall voters to 9 percent of the overall voters.”
Busch said they discovered that 70 percent of the rejected provisional ballots were from Republicans or right-leaning independents. “Folks that leaned towards Abe in in-person voting and mail-in balloting shifted during the provisional ballot counting,” she said. “Pima County shifted by 18 percent and Maricopa by 15 percent, indicating that some form of bias was used in determining whether or not to accept or reject these provisional ballots in order to alter the outcome.”
WPAA has compiled “hundreds of these declarations from voters, along with the supporting evidence and documents to show their vote should have counted.”
She read the stories of several voters who were disenfranchised, who were told at the polls they would have to vote a provisional ballot since they were no longer registered to vote in their county, only to find out that the provisional was never counted later. One woman who lives in Maricopa County said she merely paid her daughter’s car registration as a wedding present, which resulted in transferring her own voter registration to Pinal County.
A Native American woman in Pima County who had voted for years showed up at the polls on Election Day and was told she wasn’t registered to vote there, but was registered in Maricopa County, even though she hadn’t lived there in years. She was so determined to vote that she drove to Maricopa County. The poll workers told her she wasn’t registered to vote there either, and her vote was rejected because she was not found in the voter registration system.
A couple in their 90s who rent a trailer on tribal land in northern Arizona during the summer discovered their registration had been changed to that county, even though they have never accessed Service Arizona online.
Busch cited the refusal of then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs while serving as secretary of state to notify Hamadeh of the undervotes in Pinal County that were found after the election, narrowing his loss to only 280 votes. Hamadeh only found out after his election contest trial ended, and has been trying to obtain a new trial to include the new evidence, since there may have been undervotes in other counties that would put him in the lead, along with all the new evidence of provisional votes that were not counted.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act that Busch referred to, known as the Motor Voter Act, requires states to provide a simple voter registration process for people obtaining driver’s licenses or their renewal. It was intended to update people’s voter registration addresses for procedures involving their driver’s licenses, not for transactions involving vehicles or vehicles owned by family members.
Earlier this month, Hamadeh filed another election lawsuit, demanding decertification of the election. He cited the disenfranchisement of Republicans on Election Day in Maricopa County due to the voting machine tabulators not recognizing the ballots since they were printed on 19-inch paper instead of 20-inch.
Hamadeh’s initial lawsuit is at the Arizona Court of Appeals, where he is asking the court to overturn the trial court’s decision not to grant him a new trial after discovering the undervotes in Pinal County.
Judges often overturn elections based on a few small incidents. In 2019, a judge ordered a new election for a Georgia House seat after finding that four voters were ineligible. Also that year, in North Carolina, Democrats a judge ordered a new election where a contractor was accused of illegally collecting hundreds of ballots for the winning Republican candidate. He wasn’t convicted yet, merely accused. In 2021, in Surry County, North Carolina, a judge ordered a new election in the commissioners’ race due to a poll worker informing voters that one of the candidates was deceased.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Absentee Ballots” by Lance Fisher CC2.0.
