After litigation from interests including the Secretary of State and a retirees’ group, the county board in Cochise County, Arizona, has finally completed its canvass of the results from the 2022 midterm elections, signing off on the numbers ahead of further certification by the state.
A judge delivered an order for the board to finalize its canvass on Thursday, demanding the body fulfill the requirements by 5 p.m. local time. The board delayed the move beyond the legally mandated deadline amid concerns about the certification for use of machines employed during the elections, although other officials have attested to the appropriately established security of the equipment. Refusing to complete certification could have left the tens of thousands of voters of the county without a voice in the initially certified results. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who recently won the election to be Arizona’s governor, is under her own legal requirements for the timing of certification, and she could have moved forward without the Cochise results. After the judge’s order, the vote on the three-member board, which includes one Democrat, was 2-0. The second Republican member didn’t participate.
The post-election process of handling the results will be continuing beyond the state-level certification scheduled for Monday, in part with a recount scheduled for races including the contest for state attorney general. Initial results show the Democrat winning, but the margin is small enough that automatic retabulation was triggered. The seemingly defeated Republican candidate already filed a lawsuit seeking a court declaration he was the rightful winner on the basis of multiple claims in which he didn’t even present any direct evidence of issues with the initial counting process in his race. In one instance, his case pointed to data from past elections. In another, it relied upon a single contested example from this year’s governor’s race in Arizona. The lawsuit was dismissed because it was filed too early, and he could file again.
The order for Cochise County to act was apparently from Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley, who said their certification responsibilities were “non-discretionary.” It’s the same kind of upheaval of a largely procedural endeavor that Trump and his allies tried to enact in Congress after the 2020 presidential election. County board members in Maricopa County, which is Arizona’s largest by population, also faced pressure not to certify this year’s results, although they did so anyway. At least a couple individuals participating in a public comment section threatened board members with death, one via reading an apparent Bible passage that talked about the execution of the “wicked” and another via talking up the supposedly capital offense of “interference.” Trump has been among those campaigning against the legitimacy of this year’s Arizona election results.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
