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      Warnock’s Victory Forges Democrats’ Path Through the New Battlegrounds

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      Forget about Florida and Ohio: Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics.Follow our latest updates on the Georgia Senate runoff.For decades, Florida and Ohio reigned supreme over presidential politics. The two states relished their role crowning presidents and spawning political clichés. Industrial Cleveland faced off against white-collar Cincinnati, the Midwestern snowbirds of the Villages against the Puerto Rican diaspora of the Orlando suburbs.But the Georgia runoff, the final note of the 2022 midterm elections, may have said goodbye to all that. The Marietta moms are in charge now.Senator Raphael Warnock’s win over Herschel Walker — his fifth victory in just over two years — proved that the Democratic surge in the Peach State two years ago was no Trump-era fluke, no one-off rebuke of an unpopular president. Georgia, with its storied civil rights history, booming Atlanta suburbs like Marietta and exploding ethnic diversity, is now officially contested ground, joining a narrow set of states that will select the next president.Mr. Warnock’s race was the final marker for a 2024 presidential road map that political strategists, officials and politicians in both parties say will run largely through six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The shrunken, shifted battlefield reflects a diversifying country remade by the polarizing politics of the Trump era. As white, working-class voters defected from Democrats, persuaded by Donald J. Trump’s populist cultural appeals and anti-elitist rhetoric, demographic changes opened up new presidential battlegrounds in the West and South.That is not good for Mr. Trump, who lost all six of those states to President Biden two years ago, as he begins to plot his third presidential bid. Other Republicans have found more success pulling together winning coalitions in states defined by their growth, new transplants, strong economies and a young and diverse population. But if the party wants to reclaim the White House in 2024, Republicans will have to improve their performance across the new terrain.“You’re going to have your soccer moms and Peloton dads. Those college-educated voters, specifically in the suburbs, are ones that Republicans have to learn how to win,” said Kristin Davison, a Republican strategist who worked on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia, a once-red state that, until Mr. Youngkin’s victory, had turned a more suburban shade of blue. “It’s these growing, diverse communities combined with the college-educated voters.”“I secured my vote!” stickers at a polling place in Georgia.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesVoters at Morningside Presbyterian Church in Fulton County on Tuesday morning.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesIn most of the six states, midterm elections brought out deep shades of purple. In Arizona, Democrats won the governor’s mansion for the first time since 2006, but a race for attorney general remains too close to call. In Nevada, the party’s candidate won re-election to the Senate by less than one percentage point, while Republicans won the governor’s office. The reverse happened in Wisconsin.Mr. Warnock narrowly defeated Mr. Walker on Tuesday. But Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, handily toppled Stacey Abrams, a Democratic star, in his re-election bid last month.Only Pennsylvania and Michigan had clean Democratic sweeps in statewide offices.Republicans, meanwhile, swept Florida, with Gov. Ron DeSantis winning re-election in the state by easily the largest margin by a Republican candidate for governor in modern history. In Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan, widely considered to be one the Democratic Party’s strongest candidates, lost his bid for Senate by six percentage points.That new map isn’t entirely new, of course. Since 2008, Democrats have hoped that demographic changes and millions of dollars could help put the growing pockets of the South and West in play, allowing the party to stop chasing the votes of white, working-class voters across Ohio and Iowa.But the party has made inroads before, only to backslide later. When Barack Obama carried North Carolina in 2008, pundits and party officials heralded the arrival of the Democratic revival in the New South. President Obama lost the state four years later and Mr. Biden was defeated there by a little more than a percentage point.Democrats argue their victories in Georgia will be more resilient. Mr. Warnock’s coalition looked very similar to Mr. Biden’s — an alliance of voters of color, younger voters and college-educated suburbanites.For Republicans, the winning formula requires maintaining their sizable advantage among rural voters and working-class, white voters, without fully embracing the far-right stances and combative politics of Mr. Trump that could hurt their standing with more moderate swing voters. Mr. Kemp followed that path to an eight-percentage-point victory.But Mr. Walker was in no position to expand his voting base. He was recruited to run by Mr. Trump, despite allegations of domestic abuse, no political experience and few clear policy positions, and spent much of his campaign focused on his party’s most reliable voters.While votes were still being counted late Tuesday, Mr. Warnock appeared to improve on Mr. Biden’s margins in the suburban counties around Atlanta, including Gwinnett, Newton and Cobb County, home to Marietta.Herschel Walker and his team after a campaign stop in Dawsonville, Ga.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesGreeting supporters at a Dawsonville restaurant.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesDemocrats recognized the rising influence of the Sun Belt in a high-profile way last week, when the Democratic National Committee advanced a plan to replace Iowa, a former battleground state that has grown more Republican recently, with South Carolina and add Nevada, Georgia and Michigan to the early-state calendar.“The Sun Belt delivered the Senate Democratic majority,” said Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada who will face her first re-election campaign in 2024. “The party needs to invest in us and that’s what they’ve done by changing the calendar.”Already, investment in these new battlegrounds has been eye-popping. In Georgia, $1.4 billion has been spent by both parties on three Senate races and the one contest for governor since the beginning of 2020, according to a New York Times analysis.The flood of political activity has surprised even some of those who have long predicted that their states would grow more competitive.“We all thought Arizona would probably be a battleground state at some point like a decade or so down the road,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research with the polling firm OH Predictive Insights, which is based in Phoenix. “It’s mind-blowing that it came so quickly to be quite honest.”Political operatives in Ohio and Florida insist that their states could remain competitive if Democrats would invest in organizers and ads. But for presidential campaigns, the goal isn’t to flip states but to identify the easiest route to 270 electoral votes.David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, acknowledged that the changed politics had created a national political dynamic that’s bad for Ohio but better for his party. “The fact that Ohio is less essential than it used to be is a good thing because it means there are other states that are now winnable that weren’t 10 years ago. Colorado and Virginia were Republican so you had to win Florida and Ohio,” he said, evoking the predecessor to the cable news interactive maps. “That’s why Tim Russert had them all over his white board.”Senator Raphael Warnock with the rapper Killer Mike at a campaign event on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe Warnock campaign visited Georgia Tech on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe country wasn’t always so dependent on such a small group of deciders. In the 1980s, presidential candidates competed across an average of 29 states. That number fell to 19 during the 2000s, according to data compiled by FairVote, a nonpartisan advocacy group that works on election practices. In 2020, there were just eight states where the margin of victory for either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump was under 5 percent.The shrinking map leaves one clear loser: The bulk of American voters. About 50 million Americans live in the six states poised to get most of the attention, giving about 15 percent of the country’s nearly 332 million people an outsize role in determining the next president.For nearly 11 million Georgians, the political attention showered on their state during the midterm elections won’t be gone for long. More

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      Arizona Certifies Midterm Election Results After GOP Resistance

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      The state’s top officials certified the results after weeks in which several Republican candidates have sowed baseless doubts about the outcome.Arizona’s top officials signed papers to certify the results of the state’s midterm election on Monday, completing a normally routine task that had become troubled in a state where Republican activists and candidates have claimed without evidence that the election results were irredeemably marred by widespread problems.Two heavily Republican counties in Arizona initially delayed certifying their results but ultimately did so. In one case, in Cochise County, certification came only under order from a judge.Finally, at an event on Monday that was closed to the public but broadcast live, the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who won this year’s race for governor, signed documents to certify the results in all 15 counties.Also signing the certifications were Gov. Doug Ducey and Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, both Republicans, along with Robert Brutinel, the chief justice of the State Supreme Court.In a speech before the signing of the documents, Ms. Hobbs addressed some of the conspiracy theories that had been spreading and said that the election had been properly conducted.“Powerful voices spread misinformation that threatened to disenfranchise voters,” she said. “Democracy prevailed, but it’s not out of the woods.”Mr. Ducey, the departing governor, explained that state law required the certification as part of the democratic process.“I swore an oath to uphold the law,” he said.Ms. Hobbs’s opponent for governor, Kari Lake, who lost by more than 17,000 votes, ran a campaign heavily focused on false conspiratorial claims of stolen elections. She and her allies have vowed to continue fighting the outcome, sowing doubts about the results with public statements and social media posts.The efforts have made Arizona the center of the national election-denial movement, attracting activists who have gained influence spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election as they speak at protests and local government hearings.Ms. Lake and the Republican nominee for attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, have suggested that after the certification, they may file lawsuits challenging the election results. Mr. Hamadeh is trailing Kris Mayes, a Democrat, by about 500 votes in a race that has not yet been called and is headed to a recount.Mr. Hamadeh previously filed a lawsuit asking a judge to declare him the winner, which was dismissed by the court as “premature” since under state law, a lawsuit challenging election results needs to be filed after the certification of an election, not before it. (Such a challenge must be filed within five days of certification.)The Republican candidates and their allies, including right-wing activists and media figures like Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald J. Trump, have claimed for weeks without evidence that voters in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county, were “disenfranchised.”They have pointed to technical problems on Election Day that led to long lines at some polling places. But in fact there has been no sign of widespread voter disenfranchisement, because voters who encountered problems were able to cast ballots via backup systems or at other polling locations.A New York Times review of dozens of accounts from voters, poll workers and observers that were posted by Ms. Lake and her allies found that many voters acknowledged that, while inconvenienced, they had ultimately been able to cast their ballots. More

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      ‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battleground

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      ‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battleground Arizona voters rejected key election deniers, but false conspiracy theories have maintained their powerThe lead-up to Arizona’s midterms saw tactics designed to disrupt the American democratic process in a battleground state where election denialism ran rampant. Though voters broadly rejected election deniers, the grip of their ideas remains strong among large portions of the right in the state, which is now at the forefront of the fight over democracy in the US.“Voters in swing states sent a message that they were not receptive to election denialism. They didn’t send that message everywhere,” said Daniel I Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.Weiner added: “There is going to continue to have to be built a greater consensus amongst Americans across the ideological spectrum that this is out of bounds. This election was reassuring. It certainly doesn’t mean the election denialism has gone away, though.”As soon as voters started dropping off their ballots, people in tactical gear with guns started monitoring them. One rural Arizona county kicked off, then backed away from, plans to hand count all ballots. Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, said she wouldn’t concede if she lost.After election day brought printer problems in Maricopa county, the state’s largest by population, the bluster and election denialism grew. The county has said those problems did not prevent voters from casting a ballot and that they will be investigated, but still some Republicans want a “re-vote,” a new election, and some statewide candidates who lost have refused to concede their races.Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders voteRead moreOthers are filing or preparing to file lawsuits, as legal letters fly from the state attorney general’s office and the Republican party. One county refused to certify its results, only doing so under court order. Maricopa county supervisors faced a vengeful crowd, some part of a traveling group in a “QAnon-themed Scooby Doo van” that invoked God and country to condemn this year’s election.“I never could have imagined in county government that we’d see this kind of vitriol towards us, but I think that these people have been sold a story, a narrative, and they believe that very strongly,” said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors. “And that narrative is that we are traitors, that we have violated the law, that we’re Rinos [Republicans In Name Only]. They didn’t come up with it on their own.”In this closely watched, tightly divided state that will help decide the 2024 election, skepticism of election results has found an audience with some Republican leaders, as the state has shifted away from Republicans in the past decade.While other states have embraced election conspiracy theories as well, Republicans in the Arizona senate encouraged such claims when the chamber initiated a so-called audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa county by a group called the Cyber Ninjas. Their practices and results were widely criticized by elections experts and actual auditors, but they set Arizona at the forefront of a growing anti-democratic movement.Some of the movement’s biggest names receive extensive fundraising hauls and social media attention by casting doubt on elections. The Arizona Republican party, led by Kelli Ward, has embraced Trumpism and election lies, casting out moderate Republicans like those who typically win statewide elections and setting the tone for an adversarial relationship between the state party and some elected Republicans who have defended elections.“It has nothing to do with patriotism. It’s a machine, a money-making effort,” said Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker who was voted out in his Republican primary. “They found how to do it. The formula works … It would seem obvious to somebody with rational thinking that I am being played for my wallet.”While Republicans lost key positions statewide, they still hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the Arizona legislature, and many moderate Republican votes were driven out of the legislature during their primaries. State government will be divided, with a Democratic governor and Republican-led legislature, so extreme election laws are unlikely to become law – but the forthcoming session should see lots of election-related fireworks.Already, one incoming Republican lawmaker has vowed not to vote for anything until the state redoes the 2022 election. The elections committee in the Arizona senate will be chaired by Wendy Rogers, one of the most vehement election deniers in the state, who is fundraising on the idea of redoing the election.Election deniers faced consequencesThe fever hasn’t yet broken, but the signs of slowing have started to appear. Certainly, losing big offices – Democrats won the races for governor, US Senate, secretary of state and attorney general in Arizona, and generally outperformed midterm expectations nationwide – show that there are consequences for alienating moderate voters who swing elections here. Such consequences, elections experts say, are critical for hindering the spread of election denialism.Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’ Read more“The only way out of this situation, this morass that we seem to find ourselves in, is if there’s accountability for those who are undermining our elections and who are attacking the legitimacy and the integrity of the process,” said Tammy Patrick, a former Maricopa county elections officer.The courts can also send a message that refusing to follow election law – as in Cochise county, which initially refused to certify its votes – will not be tolerated.A federal judge sent such a message on 1 December, in response to a lawsuit filed by Lake, the GOP governor candidate, and the Republican secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, which sought to prevent the use of machines to tabulate votes. The US district court judge John Tuchi approved sanctions against Lake and Finchem’s attorneys, sought by Maricopa county, calling the lawsuit “baseless” and “frivolous”.Some, including former prosecutors in Arizona, want to see criminal charges against the Cochise supervisors for abdicating their duty as elected officials.“I’m not a big fan of criminalizing a bunch of stuff,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director for the voting rights group All Voting is Local. “On the other hand, if people are willing to break the law and break the law and break the law and continue to break the law when they’re told they’re breaking the law and break the law again, then at some point, you have to hold those people accountable.”Will it get better or worse?Those grappling with threats to democracy since 2020 see some signs that the movement is petering out, though they acknowledge 2024 could see more activity given the high stakes of the presidential election.The protests leading up to election certification in Arizona were small – one traveling protester, David Clements, said he was heading back to New Mexico after several days of protests because “it doesn’t seem like the people of Arizona cared”.The courts stepped in and made it clear, in multiple instances, that election shenanigans wouldn’t be tolerated.The Arizona Republican party is seeing efforts from some moderates, including the former Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, who lost in the primary, to realign the party under a broader tent that could start to win elections again. Taylor Robson called on Ward to resign, saying Ward and Lake were the “megaphones” of the false election narratives that sunk the party in 2022.The state party, though, is full of Republican foot soldiers who are closely aligned with Ward. It has often run farther to the right than the state itself and censured moderate Republicans, including the current governor, Doug Ducey. Getting the party’s activists to choose a mainstream, moderate Republican to run the party is a tall order. Ward is not expected to run again, though her Maga allies are sure to seek the leadership position.Gates, the Maricopa supervisors chairman, said he didn’t know for sure if the noise would die down. Candidates and outside parties still could and would file lawsuits, as was their right, he said. If, after that, people continued to question the results, then he would know the narrative continued.‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaRead more“If the thought is to re-create a so-called audit on the lines of what happened in 2021, I think that’s not in the best interest of the state and could lead to even more election denialism in 2024,” Gates said.Bowers, the outgoing Arizona House speaker and one of the few vocal Republican defenders of elections inthe state, said he didn’t know how to break through the propaganda his party members have been fed. They seem to have “surrendered rationality”. He said many friends had been driven to vote Democratic for the first time. He himself didn’t vote for any election deniers and instead “wrote in some good people”.The party, though, seems stuck on the 2020 election, and he thinks it will only get worse. People had found success, at least in growing their social media followings and raising money, by leaning into fear and blaming others for their losses, he said.“Hatred has a great grip on the heart. And when you feed it, it gets tighter and tighter,” Bowers said.TopicsUS politicsThe fight for democracyUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansArizonafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders vote

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      Rural Arizona county certifies midterm results after judge orders voteThe Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the results after threat of lawsuits A rural Arizona county finally certified its election results on Thursday after a judge ordered the county’s board of supervisors to do their jobs just a couple of hours earlier.The Cochise county board of supervisors voted 2-0 to approve the midterm results, allowing the statewide canvass of the election to continue as planned on 5 December. A third member of the board who had spearheaded the effort to delay certification, Tom Crosby, did not attend the vote.Obama heads to Georgia as Herschel Walker faces new violence claimRead moreSupervisor Peggy Judd, who initially voted to delay the certification, later voted in favor after the court order.“I am not ashamed of anything I did,” Judd said during Thursday’s certification vote. “And today … because of a court ruling, and because of my own health and situations that are going on in our life, I feel like I must follow what the judge did today or asked us to do, but I feel I don’t like to be threatened.”After the county refused to certify by the 28 November deadline set by state law, it faced lawsuits from the Arizona secretary of state and the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans. The lawsuits were heard in court Thursday, with Pima county superior court judge Casey McGinley swiftly ruling that the board was required to canvass its results by that afternoon. McGinley said there was no legal basis for the board to delay or refuse to certify.The county attorney would not represent the two supervisors who voted against certifying the election, and neither would an outside attorney the board first wanted to help. Instead, an attorney was only named earlier on Thursday and did not make it to the court hearing, leaving the sued supervisors without legal representation. While Crosby wanted to continue the hearing to allow the new lawyer to get to know the case, McGinley said it would move forward immediately.A delay of the statewide certification process held huge potential consequences: Two statewide recounts, required by law, couldn’t start until the canvass was complete. Lawsuits from candidates and other groups can’t begin without official results. Voters in the county could be disenfranchised if their votes weren’t included in statewide totals. The continuity of state government itself may have been in danger, the secretary of state’s office warned.Ann English, the chair of the board and its lone Democrat, has repeatedly voted for certifying the election and against previous efforts by her colleagues to conduct a full hand count of ballots, later declared unlawful. During Thursday’s certification, she said she hopes the people pushing for not certifying realize “there’s a place for change in the legislation, and it isn’t here – we react to the legislation, we don’t create legislation for the state”.‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaRead moreAlthough the lawsuits were successful in getting the county to do its election duties, others want to see the two supervisors face criminal charges for flouting election law. One state law says a person charged with any election-related duty who refuses to perform that duty in violation of law is guilty of a class-six felony.Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general, and Rick Romley, a former Maricopa county attorney, wrote a letter to the current attorney general, Mark Brnovich, and Cochise county attorney Brian McIntyre asking them to investigate and consider criminal charges for Crosby and Judd. McIntyre has said he’s weighing whether to bring charges.“Failing to hold supervisors Crosby and Judd accountable for their violations of law could embolden other public officials to abandon their legal duties in future elections,” Goddard and Romley wrote. “This would pose a substantial threat to election administration in Arizona.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Arizona’s Cochise County Certifies Election Results as Officials End Protest

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      Officials in Cochise County gave final approval to the midterm results after a judge ordered them to end the stall tactics.An Arizona county whose Republican supervisors had refused to certify last month’s election results relented on Thursday under court order, ending an unusual standoff that had threatened to delay the formal end of the election in the closely watched battleground state.In a hastily arranged meeting, the board of supervisors in Cochise County voted 2 to 0 to approve the final canvass of votes in the largely rural county in the southeast corner of the state. The move came hours after Judge Casey F. McGinley of Pima County Superior Court ordered members of the board of supervisors to take action by the end of the day.Whatever concerns they had about the election, “it is not a reason to delay” finalizing the results, Judge McGinley said at a hearing on the matter.The board’s two Republican members, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, had said they were stalling to hear out the concerns of right-wing activists promoting a legal theory — one previously debunked by federal election officials and rejected by the state’s courts — that the state’s electronic voting equipment was invalid.But in an interview this week with The New York Times, Ms. Judd characterized the delay as a way to protest the election in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, where Republican candidates have clashed with Republican election officials over unproven claims that November’s election was compromised by technical problems.Before she voted to give up the protest, Ms. Judd acknowledged she would be disappointing some people.Peggy Judd, vice chairwoman of the Cochise County board of supervisors, after the election certification on Thursday.Rebecca Noble for The New York Times“I’m going to make a lot of people happy, and some people are going to stay mad at me anyway, but that’s OK, too,” she said. “I’m a person and our lives are all like that, ups and downs and happy and sad.”Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the Cochise County board of supervisors on Monday for refusing to certify the county’s election by the deadline. The action had threatened to delay the statewide certification of the results beyond the legal deadline of Dec. 5.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat who defeated the Republican Kari Lake in the governor’s race last month, argued in the lawsuit that the Cochise County board had overstepped its bounds. Judge McGinley on Thursday agreed, saying the board had “exceeded its lawful authority” in delaying certification.His decision followed a brief but chaotic hearing in which the county board members appeared without a lawyer. The county attorney, Brian McIntyre, had for weeks opposed a series of efforts by Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby to audit or delay certification of last month’s election, arguing that they were illegal.In the hearing, Ann English, the board’s chairwoman and its lone Democratic member, spoke up in opposition and expressed concerns about a board meeting scheduled for Friday, in which Mr. Crosby had hoped to have a group of Arizona election deniers and representatives of Ms. Hobbs’s office present their cases against and for certification — “a sort of a smackdown,” she said.“I think it’s a circus that doesn’t even have to happen,” Ms. English told Judge McGinley in the hearing. “I’ve had enough. I think the public’s had enough.”Ann English, the chairwoman of the board of supervisors, after Cochise County’s midterm election certification meeting on Thursday.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMs. English and Ms. Judd voted to end the standoff. Mr. Crosby did not attend the board meeting.Mr. Crosby and Ms. Judd had at various times said that their efforts were necessary to assuage the concerns of their constituents, citing a variety of election conspiracy theories and false claims that have taken root in a large swath of the Republican electorate.In a rebuke of some of these theories, a federal district judge in Arizona found on Thursday that Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, the losing Republican candidate for secretary of state, had made “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in a lawsuit that the judge, John J. Tuchi, said was worthy of sanctions.The judge found that Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem did not meet the standards for receiving sanctions themselves, “although the court does not find that plaintiffs have acted appropriately in this matter — far from it.” He said he would determine who among the lawyers involved in the case should be sanctioned.Alan Dershowitz, one of the lawyers on the case, and other attorneys for Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The legal fallout from the election in Arizona is likely to continue. Ms. Lake has said she plans to file a lawsuit contesting the results of the election as soon as Monday, as does Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general, who is trailing his opponent by only around 500 votes.Mr. Hamadeh already filed such a suit last week, but it was dismissed on Tuesday after a state judge found it was “premature.”Ken Bensinger More

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      Arizona secretary of state sues after Republican officials refuse to certify county election results

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      Arizona secretary of state sues after Republican officials refuse to certify county election resultsCochise county officials have endorsed claims of voter fraud despite no evidence of any problems Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused on Monday to certify the results of the 2022 midterm election, despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count from earlier this month.Some officials who have embraced voter fraud theories held out, defying a state deadline and setting the stage for a legal battle.‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaRead moreThe move came amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races, and the county was holding out in the afternoon of a nail-biting day that was the deadline for several counties to confirm results.In a lawsuit on Monday, the secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said was an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise county voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit on Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until hearing once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.The state elections director, Kori Lorick, wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs was required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and would have to exclude Cochise county’s votes if they weren’t received in time.That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races, a US House seat and state schools chief, from a Republican to a Democrat.Hobbs’ lawsuit asks the Cochise county superior court to order officials to certify the results by Thursday. Failing to certify them would undermine the will of the county’s voters “and sow further confusion and doubt about the integrity of Arizona‘s election system”, lawyers for Hobbs wrote.“The board of supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters,” Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, said in an email.Democratic election attorney Marc Elias also pledged, via Twitter, to sue the county.Elsewhere, Republican supervisors in Mohave county postponed a certification vote until later on Monday after hearing comments from residents angry about problems with ballot printers in Maricopa county.Officials in Maricopa county, the state’s largest, where the state capital Phoenix is located, said everyone had a chance to vote and all legal ballots were counted.Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the nation despite tub-thumping by rightwingers during their campaigns who sought to undermine public faith in US democracy. Many of the most extreme candidates lost.But it has been a rockier road in Arizona, which became a focal point for efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud, following Joe Biden’s surprise win in the state – a result that was first called by Fox News, another fact that infuriated Trump as he railed against losing the White House.Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest-profile races over Trumpist Republicans.Lake, who lost the governor’s race to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their midterm election losses, however. They blame Republican election officials in Maricopa county for a problem with some ballot printers.David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the officials delaying certification were breeding an illegitimate distrust in elections and disenfranchising voters.“In the last year, it’s become an unprecedented dereliction of duty for county officials to violate their oaths of office and refuse to certify election results, citing ‘gut feelings’ or alleged problems in [other] jurisdictions,” Becker said.Navajo, a rural Republican-leaning county, conservative Yavapai county and Coconino, which is staunchly Democratic, voted to certify on Monday.In Cochise county, GOP supervisors demanded last week that the secretary of state prove vote-counting machines were legally certified before they would approve the election results.State elections director Kori Lorick has said the machines are properly certified for use in elections. She wrote in a letter last week that the state would sue to force Cochise county supervisors to certify, and if they don’t do so by the deadline for the statewide canvass on 5 December, the county’s votes would be excluded.That move threatens to flip the victor in at least two close races – a US House seat and state schools chief – from Republican to Democrat. TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      G.O.P. Candidate in Arizona’s Attorney General Race Sues Over Election Results

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      The candidate, Abe Hamadeh, alleged that local and state officials had mismanaged the Nov. 8 election.Abe Hamadeh, the Arizona Republican locked in a tight race to become the state’s next attorney general, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday contesting the preliminary results of an election that had already been headed to an automatic recount.The state’s final tally from the Nov. 8 election, which was set to be certified by counties by next week, has Mr. Hamadeh just 510 votes behind the Democratic candidate, Kris Mayes — 1,254,102 for Mr. Hamadeh and 1,254,612 for Ms. Mayes. That difference was within the margin needed to force an automatic recount under state law.Mr. Hamadeh’s lawsuit, filed in State Superior Court in Maricopa County, names as defendants Arizona’s secretary of state — Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who won the governor’s race — as well as the county recorders and boards of supervisors in the state’s 15 counties. The Republican National Committee joined Mr. Hamadeh in the suit as a plaintiff.Mr. Hamadeh and the R.N.C., in their complaint, ask the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the secretary of state from certifying Ms. Mayes as the winner and an order declaring Mr. Hamadeh the winner. The suit argues that equipment failures and errors in the management of polling places and in ballot tabulation led to an incorrect final vote count. It says there was no “fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,” but it claims there were mistakes that affected the final tally, given the contest’s narrow margin.The suit asks the court to allow additional votes to be counted, including 146 provisional ballots and 273 mail-in ballots that were segregated because the election system showed they came from voters who had already cast in-person ballots. It does not seek a rerun of the election, though it does claim that Mr. Hamadeh should be declared the winner. By state law, Arizona’s secretary of state is required to certify the results of the election by Dec. 5.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Arizona voters approve Republican measures to restrict ballot initiatives

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      Arizona voters approve Republican measures to restrict ballot initiativesTwo measures get go-ahead from voters but bid to institute stricter voter ID requirements fails Two Republican ballot measures that will restrict how citizens can get their own priorities on the ballot in the future were approved by voters in Arizona, while one measure to institute stricter voter ID requirements failed.The mixed messages sent by voters on these measures aligned with the state’s increasingly purple, swing-state style, where candidates and proposals that win come from both sides of the aisle.Trump in apparent Twitter snub after Musk lifts ban – US politics liveRead moreGroups planning to run initiatives will now need those measures to focus on a single subject. For measures that seek to increase taxes, they will now need to get a 60% supermajority of votes for approval. The tax increase measure passed narrowly, with 50.7% in favor, while the single subject question received 55% of the vote.“The irony is that, with such a slim majority, just over 30,000 votes, voters gave away their authority to have a simple majority make decisions,” said Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Will of the People Arizona, the campaign against the three initiative-related measures.A third measure aimed at restricting the citizens’ initiative process by allowing lawmakers to tinker with measures after they passed netted just 36% of voters in favor, failing at the ballot.The Republican-controlled state legislature, which sent questions to the ballot on eight topics this year, from in-state tuition for undocumented students to tax increases to fund rural fire districts.Progressive policies rarely find an audience at the legislature, so groups have used direct democracy to enact them instead, often at a cost of many millions of dollars while facing an intense, well-funded opposition and lawsuits that seek to throw the measures off the ballot. In recent years, citizens’ initiatives in Arizona created a higher minimum wage and recreational marijuana legalization. This year, two initiatives from the public passed, one of which will increase disclosures of dark money spent on elections and another that limits medical debt.The new restrictions will be in place for the 2024 election, where abortion rights advocates are eyeing a potential ballot measure to enshrine access to abortion. The initiatives come after years of restrictions from the legislature that have made the process more costly and difficult.Groups that run initiatives fear the new measures will mean even fewer policies can make the ballot and that the new restrictions will not be applied narrowly. Citizens’ initiatives cannot cost the state money, so they often come with fees or tax structures to fund themselves, which they worry may be construed as a tax measure that needs 60% approval.As for single subjects, most measures cross various parts of state law to ensure they are enacted completely, so initiative users are not sure how courts will construe how a single-subject rule applies to them.Running ballot measures will become more expensive, and there will be more avenues for litigation against them, Pearson said. “I think anyone looking at initiatives in Arizona needs to find clarity on the definition of a tax increase … It just complicates what should be a very simple decision for voters,” she said.The voter ID measure, which had the backing of the Arizona Republican party, narrowly failed, coming in with about 49.6% of the vote. It would have required additional information from voters on mail-in ballots, including a date of birth and an ID number, and eliminated an option for in-person voters to prove their identity and address using documents like utility bills and bank statements.Opponents to the measure warned that the additional requirements could disenfranchise voters and expose their personal information to potential identity theft, while proponents said the voter ID law would make voting by mail, the main way Arizonans vote, more secure.TopicsArizonaThe fight for democracyUS politicsnewsReuse this content More