The Arizona State Senate hired Cyber Ninjas contractor to transport ballots from the 2020 general elections at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona. Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images
Arizona's state Senate has not released documents related to a partisan electoral review.
December 2, 2012 will see a court decide whether to declare the state Senate in contempt.
Audits confirmed that President Joe Biden won the state in 2020.
A court in Arizona will decide whether to disqualify the Republican-led Senate for failing to turn over documents regarding the partisan, Cyber Ninjas examination of 2020 ballots.
The hearing was scheduled for Tuesday by Judge Michael Kemp of Maricopa County Superior Court to discuss the non-compliance with his earlier decision that the documents should have been handed over.
The state Senate's attorneys claimed that some documents were protected by "legislative privelege," an argument rejected by the court last month.
Judge Kemp stated that it was difficult to imagine more serious litigation than disclosure of documents underlying an auditor's report on the election of President Donald Trump and Senator Barack Obama. This audit is a response to fraud and corruption allegations.
A controversial GOP-led audit of Arizona's election results confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. After Biden won his first Maricopa County election since 1948, the Republicans in Arizona's State Senate commissioned Cyber Ninjas as the auditor to oversee the audit in April 2021.
Cyber Ninjas has been blamed by the state Senate's legal department for not submitting all documents related to its ballot review planning. This failed to reveal any vote-rigging that the founder of the company had claimed prior to undertaking.
American Oversight, an liberal watchdog group, brought the legal battle over "audit" documents to court. The Arizona Republic, a Phoenix newspaper has also sued over the documents. A Maricopa County judge ruled that they are public records.
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"Despite their attorney's insistence this is 'not Senate's problem', the Senate has been repeatedly and unambiguously ordered to release these records," Austin Evers (executive director of American Oversight) stated in a statement. "Each day they fail to do this makes their disregard for law and the public more evident."
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