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Rural officials in Cochise County, Arizona, certified the results of the county’s midterm elections on Thursday, following a bitter standoff with state officials over the county’s failure to approve the election results by the legal deadline. put an end to
The 2-0 vote came shortly after the judge ordered the county’s three-member oversight board to certify the result by 5 p.m. local time.
Cochise was the last of Arizona’s 15 counties to prove election. Conflicts between Republican officials in the county and Democrat and state governor-elect Katie Hobbs show how election misinformation has taken root in the nation’s pocket since the 2020 election. As a symbol, it attracted national attention.
Two Republicans on the Committee of Three had delayed certification over concerns about whether the vote-counting machine was properly certified. A rebellious board member claimed to be advancing a debunked conspiracy theory.
Statewide accreditation of Arizona results is due Monday.
Peggy Judd, one of the first Republican superintendents to vote to defer certification, Thursday said she was “not ashamed of what I did” but voted “yes” in response to a court order. Anne English, the only Democrat on the oversight committee and its chairman, joined to certify the results.
English said anyone who wants to change how elections are conducted should lobby Congress to change state laws. “We will respond to Congress,” she said. “We don’t make laws for states.”
A third member of the board, Republican Tom Crosby, did not attend the meeting.
Earlier Thursday, Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley told supervisors they had a “non-discretionary” obligation to enforce the certification.
Hobbs, along with a group of retirees, appealed to force the board to certify the results. The board’s initial delay risked disenfranchising about 47,000 voters, he said, Mr Hobbs.
McGinley said whatever concerns regulators and the public had about the vote tallying machine were “no reason to delay the investigation” of the results.
His ruling followed weeks of controversy in this Republican homeland when the Republican Party, which holds the majority on the board, attempted to register its disapproval of the machine. Republican overseers have called for a rough tally audit of the November general election results, but failed.
Arizona has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories since President Joe Biden once definitively overthrew the red states in 2020, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Grand Canyon State in nearly a quarter century. rice field. Public rallies in Cochise and elsewhere saw raucous demands for local officials to exercise largely ministerial authentication functions in order to overturn the election.
Earlier this year, in Otero County, New Mexico, a court ordered the certification of primary election results after a local board voted against certification, saying it did not trust the tallying machine.
“On the one hand, this is a very local issue,” said Ryan Snow, an adviser to the Voting Rights Project on the Civil Rights Lawyers Under the Law Committee. “But on the other hand, it is also at the core of what it means to live in a democracy.
“Since 2020, we have waged a new battle in the fight for democracy: after votes are tallied, will they be validated?” he added. .
At Thursday’s court hearing, Crosby tried to delay the proceedings so that lawyers hired by the supervisor could be ready hours before the hearing. The judge denied the request.
The chairman of the board, English, pleaded with the judge to force the supervisor to act swiftly. “Enough,” she said. “I think the public has had enough”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
