In a courtroom in Phoenix, Arizona, two elected officials who allegedly tried to subvert the county’s 2022 election tried to get a lawsuit against them thrown out in a case one of their defense attorneys called both “silly” and “scary”.
The Cochise county supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, appeared in court virtually, to defend themselves against charges of attempted election interference for their initial failure to certify the county’s election results.
The implications of the case extend far beyond the rural county and the Phoenix courtroom 200 miles away.
The state attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, sought the charges in the deep-red border county, where election denialism has gripped part of the electorate. Those looking to sow doubt in elections found, to some degree, willing ears with the two Republicans on the board.
Their attorneys argue that the officials’ conduct did not actually delay the election results statewide. They also claim the two supervisors have legislative immunity for their votes, regardless of their underlying motivations. And, while the state has maintained that signing off on election results is a required duty not subject to supervisors’ discretion, the supervisors claim they don’t just serve as a “rubber stamp” on election results.
The Arizona legislature’s Republican leaders filed a brief in the case aligning with the supervisors, saying that the lawsuit “portends further weaponization of legal and judicial processes for political retribution”.
“What we’ve got is a rogue prosecution, a rogue prosecutor in a rogue prosecution, arguing, well, we’ll just take any legislative function – clearly, which it was, this vote – and we’re going to now read into it,” Dennis Wilenchik, Crosby’s attorney, said in a court hearing on 19 April.
The lawsuit is part of a deeper conflict – a clash between a Democratic attorney general, narrowly elected in 2022, and Republicans who question election results in the state. The recent indictments against the Republican slate of Arizona fake electors, two of whom are sitting lawmakers, further the divide.
Both Mayes and the Republican-controlled legislature allege the other side is playing politics instead of doing their job. The state house started a committee to investigate Mayes’ actions on various issues, including Cochise elections; the committee’s chair has said the group could recommend actions be taken against Mayes, including potential impeachment.
The battle lines drawn in Cochise county extend far beyond its borders, into whether local elected officials can decide not to sign off on election results, into the fate of Arizona’s future and who controls it. The culmination of the case holds potential consequences for the 2024 election, when officials at the local level could try similar tactics to question results.
Part of a pattern
After the 2020 election, activists in counties around the country turned up at meetings to allege that voter fraud stole the election from Donald Trump and demanded changes to how their elections are run.
In Cochise county, these activists repeatedly brought up unsubstantiated claims about problems with tabulation machines that made their use in elections suspect. They wanted the county to count ballots fully by hand and throw out the machines.
Crosby and Judd aligned with those activists, agreeing to a full hand-count. The idea invited a lawsuit, which led to a ruling that a full hand-count would be illegal in Arizona.
The supervisors claimed they had lingering questions about the use of tabulation machines, specifically whether those machines had the proper certification, so they refused to certify the election. A court intervened, forcing certification. Judd eventually voted in favor of certifying results after the court ruling, but Crosby didn’t show up for the meeting.
Personnel issues have plagued the elections office as these legal battles have played out. The county’s former elections director, Lisa Marra, opposed the hand count, and Crosby and Judd sued her personally in an attempt to get access to the ballots for a hand count. Marra eventually quit because of a “threatening” work environment, leading to a monetary payout.
The county is on its fifth elections director since the 2022 election, after the most recent director, Tim Mattix, left in April for personal reasons. The director before him, Bob Bartelsmeyer, was an election skeptic who stayed in the role for just five months after his conservative bonafides were repeatedly impugned by local far-right activists.
Mayes’ office contends the two supervisors’ pattern of behavior leading up to delaying certification speaks to a plan to sow chaos in elections and question results.
“This is a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the election,” the assistant attorney general Todd Lawson argued, “so that the secretary of state is unable to certify, and that chaos will be created, no one will know what will happen, and that people like the US House of Representatives, perhaps the Arizona legislature, will have to step in and declare election results, irrespective of who actually won.”
Whatever happens in the case, now in Maricopa county superior court, it will almost certainly be appealed to a higher court.
Crosby did not answer questions sent from the Guardian, responding: “No thanks.”
Judd also did not respond, and her attorney said he had advised against her speaking with the media at this time.
But Judd told Votebeat that she wasn’t a driving force for a hand count in the first place and voted for it because of what she was hearing from constituents.
“You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it,” she said.
A separate courtroom battle over the legality of hand counts, stemming from Mohave county, could affect whether Cochise and other jurisdictions pursue the elimination of voting machines in this year’s presidential election.
In the Republican-dominated county, the supervisor Ron Gould sued Mayes after her office sent a letter warning supervisors against a full hand-count of the 2024 election, something the board there had been considering but ultimately voted against.
Mayes warned that supervisors could face criminal prosecution if they proceeded with a hand count, as many counties across the country have tried to do since 2020.
Legislature strikes back
Before the first meeting of the house ad hoc committee of executive oversight in early April, Mayes held a press conference and derided the legislature’s “outlandish personal attacks” on her and the attorney general’s office.
“Perhaps our Republican senate president and speaker of the house aren’t very used to an attorney general who will actually roll up her sleeves and fight for Arizonans,” she said. “But that is what they have in me.”
In the house, Democrats skipped the meeting in protest. Representative Jacqueline Parker, the committee’s chair, said it would investigate Mayes’ actions to see whether she had weaponized her office or abused her authority, but it seemed the committee already believed she had.
The Cochise county skirmishes were just one part of their opposition – they also mentioned her refusal to prosecute anyone who violated Arizona’s abortion ban and her unwillingness to defend laws on LGBTQ+ issues such as one outlawing trans girls from playing girls’ sports, among other concerns.
One of the first records requests to Mayes’ office from the committee centered on Cochise county – in particular, an unsuccessful lawsuit brought by the attorney general when the board voted to move some election authority to the Republican county recorder, who had pushed for the hand count and cast doubt on elections.
“We would like to better understand your motivation for targeting Cochise county and including such inflammatory and irrelevant material in your court filings,” the committee chairs wrote.
Parker said in the initial hearing that she hoped Mayes cooperates with the records request because she would “really be interested in finding out why she’s only going after Cochise county and not other bad-acting counties like Pima or Maricopa, who have had, in my opinion, many, many more issues”.
After Mayes announced the fake electors charges, Parker called on her to recuse herself from “any legal matters involving elected officials or candidates” because she has “prosecuted or threatened to prosecute public officials if they dare disagree with you”.
Mayes’ office said the backlash doesn’t affect her work and that she “won’t let the partisan attacks by the GOP deter her from doing her job”.
