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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

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      ‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red Arizona

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      Analysis‘Extremists didn’t make it’: why Republicans flopped in once-red ArizonaMaanvi SinghThe state rejected hardline rhetoric amid historic turnout by young and Latino voters Arizonans rejected extremists.As their new governor, voters chose Katie Hobbs, the Democrat who oversaw the 2020 election, over Kari Lake, the extremist Trump-endorsed election denier who campaigned alongside white supremacists. They re-elected the moderate Democrat Mark Kelly to the Senate over the far-right Blake Masters, who equated abortion to “genocide” and espouses the great replacement theory. For secretary of state, voters chose Adrian Fontes, the former election official who vowed to protect voting rights, over Mark Finchem, a self-identified member of the Oath Keepers.The results defied many polls and political pundits, but were in line with broader political shifts in the formerly deep-red Copper state. Early estimates suggest that the state saw historic turnout among young voters and Latino voters that grassroots organisations in the state have been working for a decade to register and mobilise.“Our community voted like their survival depended on it,” said Alejandra Gomez, co-director of the progressive group Lucha. “Because it did.”Lucha canvassers knocked on more than 450,000 doors, including in rural counties. “We were confident that we would see some gains for Democrats,” she said. But she didn’t expect Democrats and progressives would see some of their best results in decades. Voters not only rejected rightwing election deniers, they also rejected a ballot measure – pushed by state Republicans – that would have imposed onerous new voter identification requirements and made it harder for tribal and student voters to cast ballots.Just over a decade after Arizona passed one of the more stringent anti-immigrant measures, which encouraged police to stop anyone they thought looked undocumented, voters approved a measure allowing undocumented students access to state-funded financial aid for college.“I’m extremely relieved,’’ said Carla Roberts, 56, who worked with grassroots groups to canvass and register voters ahead of the election. “I’m just so relieved that these extreme candidates didn’t make it.”Roberts, a mother to a trans daughter who used to vote Republican, turned away from the party as state Republicans began increasingly pushing anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation. Like many moderate Republican and independent voters in the state, she voted for candidates from both parties in the past. The party’s far-right shift in recent years prompted her to change her registration.Her daughter, Evelyn Roberts, 18, who voted for the first time this year, said she hoped the newly re-elected Democrats would double down on protecting voting rights, trans rights and civil rights overall.Why the Democrats’ biggest wins of the midterms weren’t in Washington DCRead moreEvelyn, who didn’t yet have a driver’s licence or state ID, and was in the process of changing her name on various government forms, was only able to vote for federal offices due to Arizona’s longstanding voter ID requirements to vote in state elections. This year, the legislature passed a law attempting to expand such requirements to presidential elections.“We need to remove the fear being created around voting,” she said.More than a third of voters in Arizona are registered Republicans, nearly a third are Democrats and a third are independent. But until recently, Republican presidential nominees tended to win the popular vote in Arizona. Donald Trump got about 49% of the state’s support in 2016, but four years later he was the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state in 24 years, allowing Joe Biden to win the presidency.This year, Trump’s endorsed candidates proved too extreme to win over voters in a state where maverick independence has long been valued over party loyalty. “Arizonans chose solving our problems over conspiracy theories,” Hobbs said at a victory rally.Extremism and hardline anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric may have ultimately alienated conservative and independent Latino voters who have played increasingly decisive roles in recent elections.“I think it would be very premature and even a little bit reckless for Democrats to think that they have a mandate now just because they won some very key races statewide against very extreme candidates,” said Joseph Garcia, the executive director of Chicanos Por La Causa Action Fund, a non-partisan group that invested $10m in voter outreach before the primaries and midterms this year. “Had there been more moderate Republicans running in these races, it might have been a different outcome.”Many Latino voters in the state – including immigrant voters as well as young second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans – lack strong ties to either big party, according to pre-midterm polling by EquisLabs.But ultimately Latino voters provided a slim margin of victory for Democrats in Arizona’s Senate race, according to an analysis by UnidosUS, which conducted election day polling in the state.“Overall, the election was not as good as Republicans expected and not as bad as Democrats had expected,” said Clarissa Martinez, the deputy vice-president of UnidosUS. “But certainly it was a good night for the Hispanic community in the sense that they reaffirmed their critical role in influencing the political landscape.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More