Arizona county refuses to certify vote

Republican officials in a rural Arizona county yesterday refused to certify the 2022 election, despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count, amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races.

State election officials have said they will sue Cochise County if the board of supervisors misses yesterday’s deadline to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass. The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until hearing once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.

Democratic election attorney Marc Elias pledged to sue the county. Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s office has also said it would sue if the county misses the deadline.

“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.

Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the country. That’s not been the case in Arizona, which was a focal point for efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud.

Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest profile races over Republicans who aggressively promoted Trump’s 2020 election lies. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor who lost to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their losses.

Lake has pointed to problems on Election Day in Maricopa County, where printers at some vote centres produced ballots with markings that were too light to be read by on-site tabulators.

Lines backed up amid the confusion, and Lake says an unknown number of her supporters may have been dissuaded from voting as a result.

The county said nobody was prevented from voting, and 85 per cent of vote centres never had lines longer than 45 minutes.

The response blamed prominent Republicans, including party chairwoman Kelli Ward, for sowing confusion by telling supporters on Twitter not to place their ballots in a secure box to be tabulated later by more robust machines at county elections headquarters. —AP