Arizona GOP Chief Appeals to Supreme Court Over Biden Win
Arizona Files Appeal in Bid to Topple Biden Victory
(Bloomberg) -- Arizona’s Republican Party chairwoman appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of a long-shot effort to nullify Joe Biden’s victory there in the presidential election, according to a filing posted online by a Democratic lawyer.
The filing comes as the high court weighs a similarly improbable bid by Texas to invalidate voters’ selection of Biden in four pivotal states, and reverse President Donald Trump’s election defeat. The court could act at any point in that case.
The high court on Friday also got an emergency filing from former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell seeking to decertify Biden’s victory in Georgia, according to Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who has been active in the post-election litigation. Neither case has been formally docketed at the Supreme Court.
The appeal by Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward says the state needs more time to conduct a new, larger examination of duplicates that were made of thousands of damaged ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, which voted heavily for Biden.
The Kraken
The appeal asks the court to invalidate two key election dates under federal law, including Monday’s meeting of the Electoral College, which will formally select the next president. Arizona GOP chairwoman also says the court should strike down the Dec. 8 “safe harbor” deadline, which gives states a guarantee that Congress will accept their slates of electors if submitted on time after challenges have run their course.
Powell’s claims of a vast election-fraud conspiracy were rejected by a federal judge in Georgia as being made too late and lacking in hard evidence. Powell, who is no longer associated with Trump’s legal team, has described her litigation as “releasing the Kraken,” a reference to a mythical sea monster unleashed by Zeus in the 1981 fantasy film “Clash of the Titans.”
Biden won 306 electoral votes and needs only 270 to become president. Arizona has 11 electoral votes, while Georgia has 16.
Separately, Texas is seeking to file a suit directly at the Supreme Court claiming its rights were violated because the Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin unconstitutionally expanded mail-in voting and opened up their elections to fraud and irregularities. The suit repeats allegations about mail-in voting that have already been roundly rejected in dozens of courts across the nation.
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