Two Republican county supervisors from Arizona are now facing felony charges over what the state attorney general alleges was an organised conspiracy to delay the certification of the 2022 election.
A felony indictment filed on Monday was first reported by a local CBS affiliate; in the indictment, Cochise County supervisors Peggy Judd and Terry Crosby are charged with interference with an election officer and felony conspiracy.
The charges, according to KTVK, stem from a dispute in the wake of the 2022 election when Ms Judd and Mr Crosby refused to cooperate with the counting of ballots, instead pushing for a hand count of roughly 44,000 of the county’s 47,000 ballots. A judge ruled against them and ordered them to participate, however, Mr Crosby continued to refuse to do so.
“I don’t feel like I broke a law. But, obviously the courts had different feelings,” Ms Judd told the Associated Press earlier in November upon receiving a subpoena from the grand jury which indicted her on Monday.
The two are outspoken critics of computerised voting machines, which have never been proven to cause or allow fraud on a widespread scale. Their complaints echo those of Donald Trump, the former GOP president, whose campaign spread conspiracies about Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems election hardware in the wake of the 2020 election.
Arizona’s secretary of State said in a statement to the Associated Press: “The repeated attempts to undermine our democracy are unacceptable.”
“I took an oath to uphold the rule of law, and my office will continue to enforce Arizona’s elections laws and support our election officials as they carry out the duties and responsibilities of their offices,” added Secretary Kris Mayes.
