Sidney Powell’s Voter Fraud Claims Fail For Third Time As Arizona Judge Rejects Case
Topline
A federal judge in Arizona dismissed a lawsuit Wednesday brought by former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell that attempted to overturn the election results, marking the third of Powell’s “Kracken” lawsuits to fail in court and dealing another blow to the attorney’s debunked and baseless claims of widespread voter fraud involving Dominion voting machines.
Former Trump legal team advisor Sidney Powell speaks at a press conference on November 19, 2020.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Key Facts
Powell’s Arizona challenge is one of four battleground state lawsuits the attorney filed, which seek to block the states’ election results and allege “massive election fraud” and wrongdoing involving Dominion Voting Systems machines.
Two of Powell’s lawsuits had already failed Monday in Michigan and Georgia, with the judge in Michigan noting Powell’s claims are “nothing but speculation and conjecture,” and the case appeared to be primarily about undermining “people’s faith in the democratic process.”
U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetawa sided with those judges, saying Powell’s allegations of fraud are “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence, and Plaintiffs’ invocation of this Court’s limited jurisdiction is severely strained.”
Humetawa threw out the case on multiple grounds, including lack of standing and waiting too long to bring the case, and said the federal court “has no power to de-certify the results” under federal law as Powell wanted.
The judge also dismissed Powell’s evidence of voter fraud, saying the hundreds of pages of affidavits and declarations the plaintiffs submitted were “only impressive for their volume.”
“The Complaint is equally void of plausible allegations that Dominion voting machines were actually hacked or compromised in Arizona during the 2020 General Election,” Humetawa wrote, characterizing Powell’s evidence as “a lengthy collection of phrases beginning with the words ‘could have, possibly, might,’ and ‘may have.’”
Crucial Quote
“Allegations that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court,” Humetawa wrote. “They most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.”
Key Background
Powell brought her battleground state lawsuits after the Trump campaign distanced itself from the attorney when she began spreading the Dominion conspiracy theory, which has been wholly debunked. The attorney’s lawsuits are part of a broader post-election legal effort by the Trump campaign and GOP allies to challenge Biden’s victory, which has been almost entirely unsuccessful. According to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, Republican plaintiffs have so far lost or withdrawn more than 50 cases and only netted one minor win. Powell’s court failure also came one day after the Arizona Supreme Court denied the state’s Republican Party chair’s attempt to challenge the election results, ruling unanimously Tuesday that GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward did not provide sufficient evidence of fraud or “any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden Electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office.’”
What To Watch For
Powell’s final battleground state lawsuit in Wisconsin has also still not been decided, and Powell has already appealed her losses in Georgia and Michigan and is likely to do the same in Arizona. The attorney has suggested she hopes to take her cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ward has also suggested she could take her challenge of Arizona’s election results to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying in a video message Wednesday that she was “preparing about what to do next.”
Further Reading
Sidney Powell’s Georgia Lawsuit Gets Thrown Out In Court (Forbes)
‘The People Have Spoken’: Sidney Powell’s Michigan Lawsuit Gets Shut Down In Court (Forbes)
How Sidney Powell’s ‘Kraken’—Pushed By QAnon—Went From Cable News To Trump Mainstream (Forbes)
Arizona Supreme Court crushes GOP chair Kelli Ward’s coup attempt (AZ Central)
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Forbes can be found here ***
