UPDATE: Cochise County has certified the results of the 2022 election after being ordered by a judge to do so by 5 p.m. on Dec. 1.
The canvass was supposed to happen earlier this week, but supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd voted against it. That led to a pair of lawsuits, including one from the Secretary of State's office.After garnering statewide attention over a controversial attempt to hand count all ballots for the 2022 election,
Judge Casey McGinley declined to delay the hearing, saying the supervisors had plenty of warning they would need an attorney and delays would be problematic. He ordered the board to convene by 3:30 p.m. Mountain Time and complete the certification by 5 p.m.
Conspiracy theories surrounding this process surfaced in early 2021, focused on what appeared to be an outdated accreditation certificate for one of the companies that was posted online. Federal officials investigated and reported that an administrative error had resulted in the agency failing to reissue an updated certificate as the company remained in good standing and underwent audits in 2018 and in early 2021.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said is an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise County voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.
"The Board of Supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters," Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, said in an email. Navajo, a rural Republican-leaning county, and Coconino, which is staunchly Democratic, voted to certify on Monday. In conservative Mohave and Yavapai counties, supervisors voted to canvass the results despite their own misgivings and several dozen speakers urging them not to.
The move is the latest drama in the Republican-heavy county in recent weeks, which started when GOP board members Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd voted to have all the ballots in last week’s election counted by hand to determine if the machine counts were accurate. The Legislature this year changed the state’s election recount law to greatly increase the threshold for mandatory recounts. It now requires a recount when the candidates are within .5% of each other. In the attorney general race, the trigger is about 12,500 votes.
Crosby and Judd wanted to hand-count all 12,000 Election Day ballots and the approximately 32,000 that were cast early. But in a ruling prompted by a lawsuit filed by a retiree group, a The Cochise County hand-count fight had threatened to delay the required statewide certification set for Dec. 5. A recount will come after that official canvass and could take until the end of the year.The two Republicans who control the Board of Supervisors have sued their own elections director to force her to conduct a greatly expanded hand count of ballots cast in the Nov. 8 election, a standoff that could affect certification of the results.
Their lawsuit against the county elections director says she refused their order to either do the expanded count herself or hand the ballots over to Republican county Recorder David Stevens so he can do the tally. It seeks an order compelling her to turn over the ballots. The lawsuit also says County Attorney Brian McIntyre "has made clear that he will prosecute any attempt by the Board and Recorder to exercise their lawful authority to take custody of the ballots to complete an expanded hand count themselves."
The Republican-dominated Cochise County board is taking that part of the order literally, proposing to expand the count to 99.9% of the ballots cast on Election Day, apparently to meet the random standard. McGinley said the county board of supervisors overstepped its legal authority by ordering the county recorder to count all the ballots cast in the election that concludes on Tuesday rather than the small sample required by state law.
Officials with a southeastern Arizona county are still grappling with a controversy surrounding how to count ballots cast in the 2022 midterms, with just weeks left before election day. FOX 10's Irene Snyder has the latest on a meeting that took place on October 26. Cochise County Recorder David Stevens was grilled in court by lawyers representing a retiree group suing to block the effort. He defended the plan, which is highly unusual and stands as nearly unprecedented in the state.
"The court will decide if it’s legal or not," he said. "But they did vote — it was a two-to-one vote — they voted for me to do this and a 100% count." Instead, he promised a ruling first thing Monday morning and said he fully expected whoever lost would immediately appeal. And Stephani Stephenson, who lives in the small Cochise County community of St. David and is the named plaintiff in the case, testified that she feared a rushed and abnormal process would potentially jeopardize her vote. She said she has faith in the current system.
The lawsuit seeks to prevent a full early ballot audit, and seeks to force the defendants to "conduct hand-count audits of early ballots only in accordance with statutory procedures and the [Elections Procedures Manual]."October 28 The meeting came amid a 5:00 p.m. ultimatum set by state elections officials for the county supervisors to spell out their plans for hand-counting some ballots.
A working session is set to take place on Friday to discuss how they are going to do the hand-count audit, while abiding by current statutes.2022 Election: Secretary of State issues ultimatum after Cochise County moves forward with hand-count audit plans The letter, dated Oct. 25 and signed by State Elections Director Kori Lorick, said the board’s response must be received by 5 p.m. on Oct. 26, or "the Secretary will deem the Board’s silence to be an admission that it is threatening to proceed without or in excess of jurisdiction or legal authority."
"There’s a large group that wants to do it. I have no problem double-checking what we do, so it depends on who shows up to do it, how you prep the positions to go forward," said County Recorder David Stevens. "[The cost is minimal] because they’re volunteers. My knowledge of it is that they are volunteers. I have no problem paying them."
Supervisors Judd and Crosby , who had proposed the full hand-count alongside the regular machine count, ultimately joined a unanimous vote against their proposal after an hours-long meeting.
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