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    Election Deniers Are Still Shaping Arizona Politics

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    There have been few political consequences for many Republicans accused of helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.Two years ago, a group of election deniers ran for office in Arizona, with Kari Lake’s campaign for governor topping the ticket. When many of them lost, it seemed like a convincing rebuke of the conspiracy theory-steeped Republicans who wanted to control the levers of electoral power in 2024.It turned out, though, that the small matter of losing was not going to keep election deniers out of the spotlight, nor away from key roles in the Arizona Republican Party and beyond.And neither will an indictment, it seems.Last week, the Democratic attorney general of Arizona charged 17 people with counts including conspiracy, fraud and forgery, alleging they made efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s narrow loss in the 2020 election that amounted to a crime. Eleven of the people charged cast fake electoral votes in support of Trump.The defendants who got the most attention are the ones who were closest to Trump at the time, like former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York, the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Boris Epshteyn, who is one of Trump’s legal advisers. (While their names were redacted in the indictment, detailed descriptions contained in the charging documents made it easy to tell who they are.)But the trajectory of some of the 11 local and lower-profile defendants is even more revealing. Their story shows how Republicans who sought to challenge the 2020 election results continue to face few political consequences, and how deeply their philosophy is woven into the politics of 2024 in Arizona and elsewhere.“The party has not only not created any distance, it has continued to forcefully embrace” election deniers, said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Phoenix.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Arizona Charges Giuliani and Other Trump Allies in Election Interference Case

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      Those charged included Boris Epshteyn, a top legal strategist for Donald Trump, and fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf in Arizona after the 2020 election.Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election were indicted in Arizona on Wednesday, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf there to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state.Boris Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s top legal strategists, was also among those indicted, a complication for Mr. Trump’s defense in the criminal trial that began this week in Manhattan over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.The indictment includes conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to alleged attempts by the defendants to change the 2020 election results. Arizona is the fourth swing state to bring an elections case involving the activities of the Trump campaign in 2020, but only the second after Georgia to go beyond the fake electors whom the campaign deployed in swing states lost by Mr. Trump. The former president, who is seeking another term, was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona case. “I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a recorded statement. “But as I have stated before and will say here again today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined. It’s too important.”Read the Arizona Election IndictmentArizona on Wednesday indicted Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, as well as the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state. Here is the indictment.Read Document 58 pagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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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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      How the Worst Fears for Democracy Were Averted in 2022

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      A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.Not long ago, Joe Mohler would have seemed an unlikely person to help bury the political legacy of Donald J. Trump.Mr. Mohler, a 24-year-old Republican committeeman and law student in Lancaster Township, Pa., voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. He voted for him again in 2020 — but this time with some misgivings. And when Mr. Trump began spouting lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, Mr. Mohler, who grew up in a solidly conservative area of southeastern Pennsylvania, was troubled to hear many people he knew repeat them.Last January, after county Republican leaders aligned with a group known for spreading misinformation about the 2020 election and Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Mohler spoke out against them — a move that he said cost him his post as chairman of the township G.O.P. committee.“I just realized how much of a sham the whole movement was,” he said. “The moment the veil is pulled from your face, you realize how ugly the face is that you are looking at.”Mr. Mohler was part of a precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate that went against its own voting history this year in order to reject Republican candidates who sought control over elections, at least in part out of concern for the health of the political system and the future of democracy.After deciding that preserving the integrity of elections was his single most important issue in 2022, he voted last month for the party’s nominee for Senate, Mehmet Oz, who hedged carefully on the question of who won the 2020 election but eventually said he would have voted to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory had he been in office. But in the governor’s race, Mr. Mohler decided he could not vote for Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate, who as a state senator was central to efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results. Mr. Mastriano had pledged to decertify voting machines in counties where he suspected the results were fraudulent and to appoint as secretary of the commonwealth, the office overseeing elections in Pennsylvania, someone who shared his views.“It was just so reprehensible,” Mr. Mohler said. “I didn’t want anybody like that in the governor’s office.”Doug Mastriano, a leader in the movement to investigate and overturn the 2020 election, was defeated in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.Mark Makela for The New York TimesThe decisions of voters like Mr. Mohler, discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump. But they did suggest a possible ceiling on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that prevented, in this cycle, the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized. Mr. Mastriano lost by nearly 15 percentage points to the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro — part of a midterm election that saw voters reject every election denier running to oversee elections in a battleground state. In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system. In all three, those candidates lost. The rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems.The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket-splitters like Mr. Mohler likely played a role.In a survey of voters in five battleground states conducted by the research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, a third who cast ballots for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited a concern that G.O.P. candidates held views or promoted policies “that are dangerous to democracy.” The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. 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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      It’s 2024. Trump Backers Won’t Certify the Election. What Next, Legally?

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      The question is most urgent in Arizona, where two of the former president’s loyalists may well become governor and secretary of state.It’s a nightmare scenario for American democracy: The officials in charge of certifying an election refuse to do so, setting off a blizzard of litigation and possibly a constitutional crisis.And there are worrying signs that the fears of independent scholars, Democrats and a few anti-Trump Republicans could become a reality. We could soon be in legal terra incognita, they said — like the days when medieval cartographers would write “Here Be Dragons” along the unexplored edges of world maps.“It would be completely unprecedented,” said Nathaniel Persily, an elections expert at Stanford University. “I hate to be apocalyptic,” he added, but the United States could be headed for the kind of electoral chaos that “our system is incapable of handling.”In Arizona, Kari Lake, a charismatic former television anchor, and Mark Finchem, a state lawmaker, have a very good chance of becoming governor and secretary of state. Both are ardent supporters of Donald Trump and his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.On Friday, a group sponsored by Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the House committee investigating the Capitol assault, put $500,000 behind a television and digital ad that underscores the alarm some anti-Trump Republicans share about Lake and Finchem.“If you care about the survival of our republic, we cannot give people power who will not honor elections,” Cheney says in the ad. “We must have elected officials who honor that responsibility.”Another reason for the worries about Arizona in particular: Unlike in other states where Trump has promoted election-denying candidates, several of the politicians who pushed back on his calls to overturn the 2020 results will be gone.Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who resisted Trump’s efforts in 2020, is leaving office after his term is up, as is Attorney General Mark Brnovich, an ally in that opposition. Rusty Bowers, who as the Republican speaker of the State House stood with Ducey and Brnovich, lost his primary this year for a State Senate seat. And even Brnovich, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against another election denier, Blake Masters, has shifted his tone about the 2020 election.“Ducey was a little bit of a moderating factor,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s leading election lawyer. But Ducey was also “willing to tolerate a lot of crazy,” Elias added.The governor is backing Lake, as is the Republican Governors Association, actions that Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist whose group is spending at least $3 million in Arizona opposing Lake and Finchem, called “despicable.” Longwell said that Lake was especially dangerous because of her ability to “talk normal to the normies and crazy to the crazies.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.What could happen if Lake and Finchem win?The most worrisome scenario, several nonpartisan experts said, is that Finchem and Lake might refuse to fulfill the traditionally ceremonial act of “canvassing” the results of a presidential election under Arizona law, or that the governor could refuse to sign the required “certificate of ascertainment” that is then sent to Washington.Elias’s firm, which has grown to nearly 80 lawyers, would then have to decide whether to sue in state or federal court, or perhaps both, depending on which path was more relevant. But he acknowledged some uncertainty about how that litigation might play out.One new factor in 2024 may be an overhauled Electoral Count Act, which is expected to pass Congress after the midterms. It would create a new panel of three federal judges who would rule on election-related lawsuits, with appeals going directly to the Supreme Court. Proponents say the new panel would allow disputes to be adjudicated more quickly.“It’s not actually all that easy to anoint the loser of an election the winner,” cautioned David Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group.“The one exception to that is the presidential election,” Becker said, in which there’s an opportunity for a “corrupt individual” to send a slate of electors to Washington that does not reflect the will of voters. If the national Electoral College results were close, a protracted dispute in Arizona could hamper Congress from rapidly determining the overall winner.But Becker said he was more worried about the prospect for political violence fueled by uncertainty than he was about the integrity of the legal system.Neither Lake nor Finchem responded to questions. Finchem has said he would certify the next election “as long as all lawful votes are counted and all votes cast are under the law,” while failing to specify what he means by “lawful.” Finchem has also said that he couldn’t imagine President Biden winning.Employees sorting newly printed mail-in ballots in Phoenix. Republicans in several states have increasingly opposed mail voting and called for a return to hand-counting ballots.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe power of a secretary of stateSecretaries of state also have enormous power over elections, though it’s county officials that actually run them.To take just one recent example: Finchem and Lake both support a return to hand-counting ballots, which election experts say would introduce more errors and uncertainty into the process.One rural Arizona county controlled by Republicans, Cochise County, initially planned to count every vote in the midterms by hand — only to back down when Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who is running for governor against Lake, threatened to sue.In neighboring Nevada, another G.O.P.-controlled county’s plan to count ballots by hand is on hold after the State Supreme Court ruled the process illegal. The Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, then ordered the hand-counting process to “cease immediately.” Her possible successor, the Trump-backed Jim Marchant, might have acted differently.One of the Arizona secretary of state’s chief tasks is assembling the elections procedures manual that, once approved by the governor and the attorney general, is distributed to county and local officials. Brnovich refused to accept the 2021 manual proposed by Hobbs, so the state has been using the 2019 edition.The manual is limited to the confines of Arizona election law. But Finchem could tinker with the rules regarding the approval of voter registration, or ballot drop boxes, in ways that subtly favor Republicans, said Jim Barton, an election lawyer in Arizona. He could also adjust the certification procedure for presidential elections.“You can imagine a lot of mischief with all the nitty-gritty stuff that nobody pays attention to,” said Richard Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.Looming over all this is a Supreme Court case on elections that is heading to oral arguments this fall.The justices are expected to rule on a previously obscure legal theory called the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservatives argue that the Constitution granted state legislatures, rather than secretaries of state or courts, the full authority to determine how federal elections are carried out; liberals and many legal scholars say that’s nonsense.If the court adopts the most aggressive version of the legal theory, Persily noted, it could raise questions about the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act, adding a new wrinkle of uncertainty.“My hair is on fire” to an even greater degree than it was in 2020, said Hasen, who published a prescient book that year called “Election Meltdown.”What to readNancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was hospitalized after he was assaulted by someone who broke into the couple’s residence in San Francisco looking for the House speaker. Follow live updates.Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spends a staggering amount of time on talk radio. And, Reid Epstein writes, it’s paying off in his vital race this year.In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz is struggling in his efforts to win over Black voters, Trip Gabriel reports.In the 24 hours before Elon Musk closed his deal for Twitter, some far-right accounts on Twitter have had a surge in new followers, researchers say.viewfinderThe Philly Cuts barbershop in Philadelphia.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesA barbershop campaign stopPhilly Cuts is more than a barbershop. It is a community gathering place for exchanging gossip, catching up on the news — and, sometimes, hosting campaign events.Last Saturday, the Democratic nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, stopped in. Before he got there, I saw the barber Damor Cannon, 46, turn to put the finishing touches on the beard of his customer, Michael Woodward.The word “VOTE” was printed on the back of his T-shirt, and the phrase “Philly Cuts for Shapiro” was on the cape draped around Woodward. On either side of the mirror were framed photos of civil rights leaders. The mirror created a third image, reflecting the present alongside the past.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More