[24][6] Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Margaret Mahoney dismissed the lawsuit on November 20, ruling that the two ballots at issue would not affect the outcome of the election.
[29] On December 9, federal judge Diane Humetewa ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing, and the allegations of impropriety brought were "sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence", instead being "largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections".
[31][32][33] The plaintiff alleged a former Coolidge Mayor candidate claimed he worked for the government and participated in a scheme to take fake ballots into the Maricopa County Election Center from a South Korean plane.
[34] Before Koch recanted his story, Judge Kevin White dismissed the lawsuit on December 15, concluding that the plaintiff had brought the suit too late and lacked standing as a qualified elector to bring an election challenge because she was not registered to vote.
[33][34][31] Burk's case was a near identical copy of the complaint filed in Bowyer v. Ducey by Sidney Powell, who claimed publicly in December 2020 that planes loaded with ballots were brought to Sky Harbor.
Though Powell did not include this detail in her court filings, she named Ryan Hartwig as a witness that would testify about "a suspicious plane" in Bowyer v Ducey.
[44] Centered on a debunked conspiracy theory known as "Sharpiegate",[45][46] the "Sharpie lawsuit"[7] from the Trump campaign against Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs alleged that legal ballots with stray markings or bleed-through from markers were being thrown out.
[8] Stories surfaced on social media claiming that election workers were purposefully having voters mark their ballots with a Sharpie so their vote would not be counted.
In response, Maricopa County announced that "Sharpies are not a problem for our tabulation equipment, and the offset columns on ballots ensure that bleed through won't impact your vote".
On November 4, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich announced an investigation; the next day, he said "we are now confident that the use of Sharpie markers did not result in disenfranchisement".
[50] Additionally, during questioning, none of the witnesses indicated that they had a basis to believe that their vote was improperly discarded, with the only impropriety raised being election workers pressing buttons for them.
[50] During the hearing, the lawyer for the Trump campaign, Kory Langhofer, stated that the plaintiffs were "not alleging fraud" or "that anyone is stealing the election", but were disputing "good faith errors".
[51] On November 13, the lawsuit regarding presidential ballots was dropped, after it became evident that the number of votes potentially to be contested (191) would not overcome Biden's margin of victory in the state (11,414 at the time, with 10,315 uncounted).