In the legal world, there is no guarantee of outcomes no matter how strong your case might be. What should happen and what actually happens don't always line up. In a sane world, this gets tried because one has to accept the allegations in the pleadings as true and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the plaintiff. I don't really see how a judge would get around that. But just because I cannot foresee egregious bullshit opinions dismissing a case doesn't mean that there won't be one.

If the judge boots this case, the weakest grounds are going to be on remedy. If the remedy requested cannot be granted, then it will get booted. I've done zero research to see if Arizona has ever thrown out an election and re-done it. So no idea if that is allowed.

I also do not see any way to prove that Lake won. Not on this shortened timeline and not without basically a complete audit. You can read between the lines. But we don't try cases like that.

If a new governor is supposed to be in place by January 2, that is an obstacle to having a new election as a remedy. Lake being named governor is the only viable remedy on this time line.

So put yourself in the judge's shoes with the presumption he is going to fairly adjudicate this case. What do you do with the Jan 2 deadline? How exactly he could push that back is a mystery. Who is AZ's governor in the interim? Since I know jack about AZ law or their state constitution, I don't know for sure if that date can be moved. It would surprise me that it could be moved at all by a judge.

The next thing is how do you decide to install Lake if you have no more than an inference from the evidence she likely won. But no actual hard evidence. The court won't be pulling the ballots out of the boxes and have them counted. I'm not sure the most MAGA of all ULTRA MAGA judges in the country could find their way around this dilemma. If being faithful to the law, how do you name someone the winner with no way to actually demonstrate it?

By this, what I mean is - what objective way will there be after the presentation of evidence that we know exactly which ballots were illegally cast and should be discarded so that we can then subtract those votes from the totals and then discover who the winner was? If Lake thinks that a court is going to derive its own formula from the total and pro-rata deduct it, I think that is a tall ask of any judge. The convoluted mess that is our election system in this country seems to limit itself to not being easily unwound. How do we find the ballot for an illegal mail vote and remove it? I've always been of the understanding that once an envelope and ballot are separated, it cannot be undone.

Likewise, how does a court figure out with reasonable precision how many people were disenfranchised at which locations and with reasonable certainty as to who they intended to vote for?

You could argue that this is an equitable remedy in that Hobbs was a candidate in this election, fucked around badly in this election, and should not be permitted to reap the fruits of this fuckery on her watch and at her direction by being declared the winner. But I am just unsure that is possible under Arizona law.

TLDR; I have no clue what this judge is gonna do and I don't envy his job at the moment.