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      Arizona Sues After County Puts an Election Skeptic in Charge of Voting

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      Cochise County, a hotbed of conspiracy theories, transferred election duties from a nonpartisan office to the county’s elected recorder, a Republican.An Arizona county is being sued by the state’s Democratic attorney general after it transferred voting oversight to the county’s Republican recorder, who has cast doubts about past election results in a place where former President Donald J. Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2020.It is the latest clash between Democrats in statewide office and Cochise County, a deeply Republican area in southeastern Arizona, where conspiracy theories about voter fraud and irregularities still swirl.The county’s nonpartisan elections director, Lisa Marra, announced in January that she would resign, citing threats against her after she refused to comply with rogue election directives from the Republicans who control county government, including plans to count ballots by hand after last year’s midterm elections. She recently accepted a position with the secretary of state’s office.The county’s board of supervisors then made David W. Stevens, the Republican recorder, the interim elections director, with the board’s two G.O.P. members supporting the new power structure in a Feb. 28 vote, and its lone Democrat opposing it.On Tuesday, Kris Mayes, who was narrowly elected as Arizona’s attorney general in November and took office in January, filed a lawsuit against the county and called the power shift an “unqualified handover.”Understand the 4 Criminal Inquiries Into Donald TrumpCard 1 of 5Intensifying investigations. More

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      Ex-Attorney General in Arizona Buried Report Refuting Voter Fraud Claims

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      Under Mark Brnovich, a Republican who left office in January, a 10,000-hour review did not see the light of day. His Democratic successor, Kris Mayes, released investigators’ findings.Mark Brnovich, a Republican who served as Arizona’s attorney general until January, buried the findings of a 10,000-hour review by his office that found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, newly released documents reveal.The documents were released on Wednesday by Mr. Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat who took office last month as the top law enforcement official in the battleground state, which remains at the forefront of the election denial movement.The sweeping review was completed last year after politicians and other conspiracy theorists aligned with former President Donald J. Trump inundated Mr. Brnovich’s office with election falsehoods. They claimed baselessly that large numbers of people had voted twice; that ballots had been sent to dead people; and that ballots with traces of bamboo had been flown in from Korea and filled out in advance for Joseph R. Biden Jr., who won Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.But investigators discredited these claims, according to a report on their findings that was withheld by Mr. Brnovich. (The Washington Post reported earlier on the findings.)“These allegations were not supported by any factual evidence when researched by our office,” Reginald Grigsby, chief special agent in the office’s special investigation’s section, wrote in a summary of the findings on Sept. 19 of last year.The summary was part of documents and internal communications that were made public on Wednesday by Ms. Mayes, who narrowly won an open-seat race in November to become attorney general.“The results of this exhaustive and extensive investigation show what we have suspected for over two years — the 2020 election in Arizona was conducted fairly and accurately by elections officials,” Ms. Mayes said in a statement. “The 10,000-plus hours spent diligently investigating every conspiracy theory under the sun distracted this office from its core mission of protecting the people of Arizona from real crime and fraud.”Efforts to reach Mr. Brnovich, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, were not immediately successful.His former chief of staff, Joseph Kanefield, who was also Mr. Brnovich’s chief deputy, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In the eight-page summary of investigators’ findings, Mr. Grigsby wrote that the attorney general’s office had interviewed and tried to collect evidence from Cyber Ninjas, a Florida firm that conducted a heavily criticized review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, at the direction of the Republican-controlled State Senate.Investigators also made several attempts to gather information from True the Vote, a nonprofit group founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, a prominent election denier, the summary stated..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” Mr. Grigsby wrote. “The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”When investigators tried to speak to Wendy Rogers, an election-denying Republican state lawmaker, they said in the summary that she refused to cooperate and told them she was waiting to see the “perp walk” of those who had committed election fraud.Ms. Rogers, who was censured by the State Senate in March 2022 after giving a speech at a white nationalist gathering, declined to comment on Thursday.In a series of emails exchanged by Mr. Brnovich’s staff members last April, Mr. Grigsby appeared to object several times to the language in a letter drafted on behalf of Mr. Brnovich that explained investigators’ findings. Its intended recipient was Karen Fann, a Republican who was the State Senate’s president and was a catalyst for the Cyber Ninjas review in Arizona.One of the statements that Mr. Grigsby highlighted as problematic centered on election integrity in Maricopa County.“Our overall assessment is that the current election system in Maricopa County involving the verification and handling of early ballots is broke,” Mr. Brnovich’s draft letter stated.But Mr. Grigsby appeared to reach an opposite interpretation, writing that investigators had concluded that the county followed its procedures for verifying signatures on early ballots.“We did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election,” a suggested edit was written beneath the proposed language.Ms. Fann did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In his role in Arizona, Mr. Brnovich was something of an enigma. He defended the state’s vote count after the 2020 presidential election, drawing the ire of Mr. Trump. The former president sharply criticized Mr. Brnovich in June and endorsed his Republican opponent, Blake Masters, who won the Senate primary but lost in the general election.But Mr. Brnovich has also suggested that the 2020 election revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast last spring, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.”In January, as one of Ms. Mayes’s first acts in office, she redirected an election integrity unit that Mr. Brnovich had created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression.The unit’s former leader, Jennifer Wright, meanwhile, joined a legal effort to invalidate Ms. Mayes’s narrow victory in November.Ms. Mayes has said that she did not share the priorities of Mr. Brnovich, whom she previously described as being preoccupied with voter fraud despite isolated cases. The office has five pending voter fraud investigations. More

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      Former attorney general in key state withheld evidence debunking 2020 election fraud

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      Former attorney general in key state withheld evidence debunking 2020 election fraudRepublican Mark Brnovich’s successor releases reports that debunked claims of fraud in Maricopa county in 2020 electionThe former attorney general of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, failed to release documents that showed his office’s investigation into the 2020 election did not find evidence of widespread fraud in the state’s most populous county.The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Brnovich would not turn over public records that detailed his investigators’ findings. His successor, the Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes, released the records, which showed several reports that debunked rampant claims of election problems in Maricopa county.Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’ Read moreBrnovich, a Republican, was running for US Senate in 2022 while his office oversaw an investigation into the 2020 election. He released two reports related to the work – one that showed just one example of a dead person voting and one “interim report” that made nebulous, unfounded criticisms of the county’s elections.But the unreleased reports show Brnovich’s investigators did not agree with some assertions he made publicly, such as that the county did not follow proper signature verification procedures or that the county had not been responsive to his requests for information.In an interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Mayes said her office discovered a bunch of unfulfilled records requests upon taking over in January. She also wanted to find any potential final report for the 2020 investigation, which was not found.Her office released two additional interim reports and an investigative summary, which are all publicly posted on the attorney general’s website now.“This office has a solemn duty to be honest and transparent with the people of Arizona,” Mayes said. “The dark cloud cast over the 2020 and 2022 elections because of the insane conspiracy theories perpetrated by high-profile election deniers could have and should have been stopped, especially as it related to Maricopa county and its elections officials. I believe the people of Arizona had a right to know this information before the 2022 election. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”The investigation is considered closed, though there are hundreds more documents going through the redaction process that will be released once the office has completed that process.The office under Brnovich spent about 10,000 hours on the investigation and each of its 60 investigators spent at least some time on it, the Post reported.Mayes said it is hard to put a dollar figure on how much that cost the state or taxpayers, but the whole effort was clearly a “distraction from the core mission of this office”.“But I also want to say I’m incredibly proud of the work the agents and support staff who worked on these investigations did. They did so diligently, thoroughly and professionally, as they do all of their work here,” she said.Mayes said she did not get any insight into why Brnovich did not release the information while he was in charge, saying Brnovich would need to answer that for himself. Brnovich did not respond to a request for comment.“This kind of failure to release information to the people of Arizona is not how this office will operate moving forward under my leadership,” Mayes said. “My administration will be truthful and transparent.”The Post report compelled elections officials throughout the state to comment on the revelations, especially those who Brnovich had previously criticized publicly.Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, said he was “absolutely disgusted” that Brnovich concealed reports on the 2020 election and applauded Mayes for finally releasing the documents. He implored people who care about elections to read the reports.“This was a gross misuse of his elected office and an appalling waste of taxpayer dollars, as well as a waste of the time and effort of professional investigators,” Hickman said in a statement.He pointed to the onslaught of threats and harassment the board, elections officials and election workers have faced while false claims of impropriety in the 2020 election lingered for years.“For three years, my colleagues have been called traitors, cheaters, and liars … and those are just the names I can print,” Hickman said. “It has been absolute hell on all of us, but I would do it again in a second and I believe that every member of this board would do it again because all of us stayed within the law.”Stephen Richer, the county’s Republican recorder, noted two elements of the reports where investigators contradicted Brnovich’s interim report by saying the county had been responsive and followed signature verification procedures. Those notes from investigators “distinctly show the ways in which our office cooperated with and supported the attorney general’s office in the development of last year’s interim report,” Richer said.Arizona’s Secretary of state Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who in 2020 was the Maricopa county recorder, said he was “deeply disappointed by the wasteful and pointless actions by a top law enforcement official who diverted thousands of hours of staff time to pursue unfounded allegations of election fraud”.TopicsArizonaThe fight for democracyUS politicsUS elections 2020RepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Arizona improves college access for undocumented students. Activists say it’s a ‘first step’

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      Arizona improves college access for undocumented students. Activists say it’s a ‘first step’Proposition 308 now makes higher education more affordable for undocumented immigrantsAndrea Vasquez, a social worker at a high school in Tucson, Arizona, was approached by a student in her senior year. She was asked how difficult it would be to attend college as an undocumented immigrant.Vasquez, 29, immediately flashed back to a younger version of herself, studying at the school where she now works, Palo Verde Magnet high school, and remembering her own struggle to get to college while being undocumented.More than a decade later, she has better news for the latest generation.“Her dream is going to a four-year university,” Vasquez said.In last November’s elections, voters in Arizona, who typically support anti-immigrant policies, narrowly approved ballot measure Proposition 308 to make undocumented immigrants eligible for the same fees and state financial aid at state universities and community colleges as local US citizens.Previously, despite growing up in Arizona’s state public school system, undocumented youth wouldn’t have been able to apply for state aid for higher education and would be classed as out-of-state students, who pay much higher fees. This was the fate imposed on Vasquez when she was graduating high school.Vasquez recalled that as a teen applying for college, the base out-of-state tuition at the time could exceed $16,000 annually at a state university. That made financial means rather than academic performance the gateway to higher education for people like her.Vasquez, who was brought to the US from her native Mexico as a migrant at the age of two, said: “I was fourth in my graduating class, I played sports, did community service [but] I couldn’t afford a four-year university.”Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’ Read moreShe cleaned houses with her mother to pay for two years at Tucson’s Pima Community College.“I wish this Proposition [308] happened when I graduated high school,” she said.In 2011, when she was in high school, Arizona adopted the strictest anti-immigration state law in the country. It allowed local law enforcement to ask anyone suspected of being in the country unlawfully to present proof of legal immigration status during routine traffic stops. It made it an offense to be caught without those papers.Arizona’s large Hispanic communities effectively lived under siege, with the law championed by hard-right Republican governor Jan Brewer, notorious Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio and the late state senator, Russell Pearce.Then, in 2012, US president Barack Obama turned Vasquez and other migrants brought to the US as minors into Dreamers – the scheme now under threat because of legislative inertia and legal fights that started during the Trump administration.Dreamers became eligible for work permits and renewable protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program. Nevertheless, higher education barriers persisted nationwide – especially in Arizona.Until Proposition 308, Arizona was one of three states, alongside Georgia and Indiana, that barred undocumented immigrants from in-state tuition.In her first State of the State speech last month, Katie Hobbs, the first Democratic governor elected in Arizona in 16 years, celebrated Proposition 308 and pledged to expand opportunities by allocating $40m to a new fund, the Promise for Dreamers Scholarship Program.“I was so pleased that the governor and her budget included the program, which wouldn’t even ask for a citizenship requirement,” said Raquel Terán, an Arizona state senator and a proponent of Proposition 308.“It’s unfair that many of the students who have been part of our education system, part of our communities, had to pay three times the in-state tuition,” she added.The American Immigration Council advocacy group issued a report supporting Proposition 308, noting: “The state is facing critical workforce shortages across the skills spectrum … Arizona will need … global talent to complement US-born workers [and to] build career pathways for immigrants already living in the state.”At her high school, Vasquez tells undocumented students about Proposition 308 but adds that they’re still ineligible for federal aid. Every year, more than 3,600 undocumented students graduate high school in Arizona.Ex-Arizona governor’s illegal makeshift border wall is torn down – but at what cost?Read moreMeanwhile, another hurdle faces Fernando Contreras, 19, as he aspires to become a doctor. Arizona is struggling with critical healthcare staff shortages exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. But when he was still a senior at Mountain View high school in Mesa, he found out most medical internships that he would need on the way to getting licensed require a social security number. He doesn’t have one: he arrived from Mexico at the age of 12 without documentation.For now, Contreras is studying at Pima Community College and is enrolled at Grand Canyon University, a private Christian school where Proposition 308 doesn’t apply, while working numerous jobs including babysitting.“The biggest downside is knowing you have to work twice as hard as anybody else to achieve what you want,” he said.Since the ballot measure passed, fees have dipped at the community college and he’s looking into whether it would be possible to transfer to Arizona State University.Jose Patiño, a 33-year-old Daca recipient and vice-president of education and external affairs at Aliento, a youth-led organization that advocated for the passing of Proposition 308, said that Contreras and many like him need a law like HB2796. It’s a bill that was introduced recently by Democratic state representative Flavio Bravo, allowing undocumented students to get licensed in the medical field by submitting a federal tax identification number in lieu of a social security number.But the bill never made it out of committee and died in the state legislature.“It’s unfortunate but there is very little understanding of the urgency of a bill like this one,” Bravo said.Patiño is still encouraged by Proposition 308, however.“The change in Arizona is partly because many of us were afraid for so long and now we are fighting back,” said Patiño, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1990 and brought to the US six years later.“Proposition 308 is the first step, but we have to keep fighting. We have learned from this country that nothing is going to be given to you.”TopicsArizonaMigrationMigration and developmentUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Kari Lake Teases Arizona Senate Run

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      Ms. Lake, a Republican who lost to Katie Hobbs in the state’s governor’s race, previewed opening salvos against Senator Kyrsten Sinema and Ruben Gallego.WASHINGTON — Kari Lake, the fiery former news anchor who narrowly lost a race for governor of Arizona last year, said in an interview that she is considering a Republican campaign for the U.S. Senate in Arizona next year.She has also scheduled campaign-style events this month in Iowa — home to her party’s first presidential nominating contest — that typically signal White House ambitions.Additionally, she is still contesting her November defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, despite her claims of misconduct being rejected in court. She has continued raising money to help finance legal bills related to her court challenges, and has also given several paid speeches, but declined to say for whom.Ms. Lake’s maneuvering in recent months has signaled that she’s eager to build out her fledgling political résumé following a midlife career shift.After spending decades as a local television reporter and anchor, Ms. Lake burst onto the political scene last year after winning a brutal primary election with a potent mix of election lies and cultural grievances. Her skills as a polished and ruthless communicator helped her come within 17,000 votes of winning Arizona’s most politically powerful office as a first-time candidate — and earned her the praise of former President Donald J. Trump, whose style she has often imitated.“Here’s your headline: Kari Lake is on the warpath,” Ms. Lake said in an interview Thursday night.But it was unclear exactly where that path would lead.Seated in the corner booth of a Washington hotel bar, Ms. Lake drank a pint of Guinness and previewed opening salvos in a potential Senate race, attacking both Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent, and Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who is running for Ms. Sinema’s seat, as “radical leftists.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2024 G.O.P. Field: Nikki Haley is expected to join the race for the party’s presidential nomination soon, but other contenders are taking a wait-and-see approach before challenging former President Donald J. Trump.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: The contest to become the party’s presidential nominee has long been shaped by where it begins: Iowa. That process could soon be overhauled.First Acts: From the symbolic to the substantive, here is what nine new governors elected last year have done in their first weeks in office.Rural-Urban Rivalries: The relationships between big cities and rural-dominated state legislatures have often been hostile. But a dispute in Nashville suggests the nation’s partisan divide is making things worse.Ms. Lake attempted to cast doubt on Ms. Sinema’s reputation as a moderate, pointing to data that showed the Arizona incumbent often votes with President Biden. An NBC poll last year showed that American voters were split over whether Mr. Biden was moderate or liberal.“She’s the furthest thing from an independent,” Ms. Lake said. “Someone somewhere said she did a couple of courageous things, well, she should do courageous stuff here every day. If you are blessed to be elected by the people, when you show up in Washington, D.C., you should be doing courageous acts every damn day.”A spokeswoman for Ms. Sinema declined to comment.Ms. Lake also attacked Mr. Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix, as a socialist and highlighted complaints by a former staff member, Ne’Lexia Galloway, who criticized him after leaving her job last year for not doing more to “speak up about the injustices” to people of color in his district. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gallego declined to comment.Ms. Lake practiced similar attack lines against Mr. Gallego, who would be the state’s first Latino elected to the Senate, during a rally last week in Arizona and on Twitter.Mayor Corey Woods of Tempe, who is Black, defended Mr. Gallego, saying Ms. Lake’s claims were misleading.“I’ve personally known Ruben Gallego for 15 plus years and I know he always stands up for what’s right,” Mr. Woods, who endorsed Mr. Gallego on Wednesday, posted on Twitter last week.Mr. Gallego also appeared to be gathering support from the Black community. Roy Tatem Jr., the former leader of the East Valley NAACP in Phoenix, spoke at a Gallego campaign event last week. Pastor Aubrey Barnwell, head of the African American Christian Clergy Coalition, delivered the invocation at the same event.A handful of other high-profile Arizonans have told Republican officials that they are considering Senate campaigns, including Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County; Jim Lamon, a wealthy businessman who ran for Senate in 2022; Blake Masters, the party’s Senate nominee who lost to incumbent Senator Mark Kelly last year; and Karrin Taylor Robson, a businesswoman who lost to Ms. Lake in the governor’s primary.Ms. Lake expressed confidence that she would easily beat any field of Republican opponents and declared that her popularity among conservative voters in the state was rivaled only by that of Mr. Trump.She disputed the notion that she was a divisive figure inside her party, saying she reached out to rivals after her primary victory last year but that many didn’t return her calls.She also played down the ill will she stirred with her attacks on John McCain, the longtime Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee who died in 2018.In August, she claimed during one speech that her candidacy “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” while making a stabbing motion with her arm. In the final days of the race, video surfaced from an event a year earlier when she asked if there were any McCain Republicans in the audience and ordered them to “get the hell out.”Ms. Lake said in the interview that some Republicans had taken the barbs more personally than the former senator would have.“I think McCain would have laughed,” Ms. Lake said. “I truly do.”Ms. Lake said her top priority remained challenging the results of the race for governor, despite court rulings against her and the swearing-in of her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, on Jan. 2.Ms. Lake’s claims that officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., had deliberately caused ballot printers to malfunction in order to purposefully sway the election were rejected in December following a two-day trial in Phoenix. Ms. Lake has appealed the decision.Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ordered Ms. Lake to pay $33,000 in fees to cover the cost of expert witnesses hired by Ms. Hobbs. More

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      Arizona’s top election official seeks investigation into Republican Kari Lake

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      Arizona’s top election official seeks investigation into Republican Kari LakeLosing gubernatorial candidate may have violated a state law that protects voter’s signatures, Democrat Adrian Fontes says The Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, asked the state attorney general Monday to investigate and potentially charge the losing Republican candidate for governor with a felony for sharing images of voters’ signatures online.Fontes, a Democrat, said GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake may have violated a state law that protects a voter’s signature from being accessed or shared by anyone other than the voter or an “authorized government official in the scope of the official’s duties”. Violations of this law carry a class six felony charge, the lowest-level felony in Arizona.Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’ Read moreLake posted the voters’ signatures on Twitter on 23 January, claiming they were part of a “bombshell” that showed mismatching signatures that shouldn’t have been counted, a frequently repeated claim after Republican losses in 2020 and 2022. The signatures she posted were from 2020 ballots.In his letter to the Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, Fontes asked that Mayes “investigate and take appropriate enforcement action against Kari Lake”. Mayes’ office confirmed receipt of the referral but said it wouldn’t have further comment on the matter at this time.Despite her loss, Lake has continued to fundraise based on the false premise that she actually won the governor’s race and that the election results will be overturned. Lake’s run for governor focused heavily on the false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen. She held a rally in Scottsdale on Sunday when Donald Trump appeared by phone and said Lake will be “victorious” in her effort to overturn the 2022 election.Since Fontes’ referral became public, Lake has retweeted several accounts who called Fontes’ election into question and who have said the referral was proof that Lake was correct in her claims of a stolen election.Lake wasn’t the first to share voters’ signatures to make claims about their validity. The signatures have been shared by state lawmakers and election-denial groups in presentations at the state legislature, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield pointed out on Twitter, though it’s not clear how the confidentiality of the signatures was originally breached.TopicsArizonaThe fight for democracyUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Key Senate Races to Watch in 2024

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      Emily Elconin for The New York TimesIn Michigan, which has an open seat, Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who comfortably won re-election in November, is also taking steps toward a possible Senate run in 2024. Her moves include forming a national campaign team and meeting with leaders across the state, a person close to the congresswoman confirmed last week. More