Judge: Send election results
Cochise County Board of Supervisors is reprimanded for failure to certify votes earlier for state canvass
Compelled by a court order, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors certified the results of the Nov. 8 election Thursday on a 2-0 vote.
The vote means all Arizona counties have agreed to send their results to the Secretary of State’s Office and ends a weekslong election drama spooling out of the southeastern Arizona county.
The board’s two Republican supervisors since October have raised doubts about the reliability of vote tabulation machines. Their actions resulted in a series of losing court battles, the most recent coming Thursday, when a judge ordered them to canvass the election results and get the results to the Arizona secretary of state by 5 p.m.
The Secretary of State’s Office confirmed Thursday evening that it had received the Cochise certification, which will allow it to proceed with the statewide canvass, scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday. The canvass is the official proclamation of the winners from the November election and sets in motion the work on three automatic recounts required by law.
Supervisor Tom Crosby did not attend the board meeting ordered by Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley, although Crosby was present two hours earlier for the court hearing.
Crosby, along with Supervisor Peggy Judd, had ignored repeated legal advice that their actions were illegal, forcing the board to seek outside counsel to represent them.
“I don’t like to be threatened,” Judd said before casting her vote to certify. She said she was relieved to not be threatened with jail time, as had been intimated in a Mohave County supervisors’ meeting earlier this week. However, defying a court order risked contempt charges.
Judd defended her actions, saying it was important to ensure elections are “fair and good,” and balked at making the motion to certify the results. Instead, she deferred to Ann English, the board’s chair and a Democrat who has opposed her colleagues’ moves.
“I’m not done fighting. I couldn’t even make the motion,” Judd said.
The vote came after a one-hour court hearing at which McGinley ordered the board to convene a meeting Thursday afternoon to canvass the election results.
He reprimanded the board for its failure to fulfill the obligation to do so earlier this week. The hearing lasted less than a half-hour and proceeded without an attorney representing the board.
McGinley rejected Crosby’s request to continue the hearing until Tuesday so the board’s attorney — hired two hours before the hearing — could “get up to speed.”
“The board has exceeded its lawful authority,” McGinley said, adding the law “unambiguously requires” a vote within 20 days of the election. That date was Monday, Nov. 28.
He said there is only one exception to that deadline: if votes are missing or still being tabulated. That was not the case in Cochise County, he said.
McGinley is not new to the Cochise election issue. On Nov. 7, he ruled that the board had broken the law by pursuing a 100% hand count of every ballot cast in the Nov. 8 election.
Crosby and Judd in Thursday’s hearing leaned on an insistence that they needed more information about whether ballot tabulation machines were certified by an accredited laboratory. They set a Friday meeting to explore the issue further and then consider canvassing results.
English told the court that meeting was a tactic to delay certification and further air election conspiracy theories.
Attorneys for the Arizona Alliance of Retired Americans said that point was underscored by comments Judd made to the New York Times earlier this week. Judd said the machine complaints were a “pretext” to mask their real concern, which was Election Day problems in Maricopa County.
English called the planned Friday meeting “a sort of smack down between the Secretary of State and the election deniers,” citing the agenda laid out by Crosby. The Secretary of State’s Office said earlier this week it would not participate. English called the plan “a circus that doesn’t have to happen.”