By Corinne Murdock |
The Maricopa County Superior Court has denied an attempt by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to bar the release of Maricopa County’s absentee ballot envelopes from the 2022 election.
Last Thursday, Judge John Blanchard denied Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ motion to dismiss the request for the ballot data made by election integrity activists: We the People Arizona Alliance (WPAA), represented by failed gubernatorial (now Senate) candidate Kari Lake’s counsel challenging the 2022 election results, Bryan Blehm.
Blanchard ordered Fontes to work on a solution with WPAA and, at minimum, provide a sworn affidavit of the difficulties his office would have in providing the envelopes. The judge also gave WPAA permission to resolve these difficulties with Fontes or bring suggested remedies to the court.
“[T]he parties have not had a meaningful opportunity to discuss, test, and explore the stated technological and practical reasons why [the secretary of state] cannot comply with the public records request,” said Blanchard. “[T]he parties shall meet and confer regarding the Secretary of State’s reasons for refusing to produce the data that is responsive to [the request].”
During last week’s hearing on the case, Kyle Cummings with the attorney general’s office claimed that election officials would have to pull each individual voter file in order to access the ballot envelopes. Cummings said that such an undertaking would be far too time-intensive and costly for the secretary of state.
“The secretary [of state’s] folks who manage their database and their systems said that, ‘Hey, we can’t produce this, it would have to be done individually, we cannot just gather it all together,’” said Cummings. “The secretary’s office does not have the time, resources, or manpower to pull at least one million individual entries for the request[.]”
Blehm countered that a database administrator could “easily” pull that data and consolidate it into one electronic file. He noted that the database lead for the secretary of state’s office should be made to testify on why that isn’t the case.
“If they’re going to continue to take the approach that they have to run an individual query for each of these five things of data for over a million voters, I would like the opportunity to depose their database administrator or data manager to dive into this,” said Blehm.
Lake said the ruling was “great news.”
Absentee voting remains the primary method of ballot casting in Arizona. As of Monday, Fontes reported over 4.1 million registered voters in the state, with Republicans wresting the majority from independent voters: about 1.42 million Republicans and over 1.41 million independents.
Over 1.2 million voters registered as Democrats, over 32,400 registered as libertarians, over 25,900 registered as No Labels Party, and just over 2,500 registered as Green Party.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
