They want Cochise County Elections Director Lisa Marra to deliver the roughly 12,000 ballots cast on Election Day to the county recorder, an elected Republican. The county attorney-elect warned the private attorneys representing the two GOP council members that taking ballots without authorization could subject their clients to felony charges. At a heated board meeting Tuesday, several members of the public chided the two Republicans on the three-member board for seeking to pay for the case with county funds. One called a board member a “demagogue” who “makes a disgusting pretense” of the democratic process. The push to manually count ballots in the Republican-leaning county in the state’s southeastern corner, home to the iconic Old West town of Tombstone, has gained momentum from false allegations by former President Donald Trump and his allies of widespread fraud and voter rigging. conspiracy theories in the latest presidential contest. There was no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines in 2020 or during this year’s midterm elections. Still, conspiracy theories have spread widely and sparked heated public meetings in mostly rural counties across the West, amid calls to ditch voting machines in favor of paper ballots and full counts. Controversy nearly delayed the certification of primary results earlier this year in a New Mexico county and has fueled an ongoing court battle over a full hand count in a Nevada county. Arizona Republicans lost major races in this year’s election, including for the U.S. Senate, governor and secretary of state. Arizona’s evolution into a political battleground has angered many conservatives in a state traditionally considered staunchly Republican. In Cochise County, Republican candidates for those seats won by wide margins. The Republicans’ lawsuit, filed late Monday, comes a week after a judge blocked the board from hand-counting all ballots cast during early voting, but also gave them room to pursue a broader count. The judge said state law allows the county to expand the small hand count used for official verification designed to confirm the accuracy of vote-counting machines, provided it is done randomly. After the ruling, Republican board member Peggy Judd proposed an expansion of hand counting to up to 99 percent of Election Day ballots, though that proposal has now been scaled back slightly. The lawsuit filed by attorneys for Judd and fellow GOP board member Tom Crosby said they hope to hand-count four races on all ballots from 16 of the county’s 17 polling places. Their lawsuit against the county’s director of elections says she refused an order to either conduct the expanded count herself or turn the ballots over to Republican County Recorder David Stevens so he could count them. She is seeking an order compelling her to hand over the ballots. Upping the ante, the suit alleges that Republican board members concluded that expanded hand counting is “necessary to ensure completeness and accuracy prior to certification of elections.” Certified county results must be received by the secretary of state no later than November 28. That means time is short to get a court order, remove about 12,000 Election Day ballots from the director’s possession and gather the more than 200 volunteers Stevens said is ready to do the hand counting. . Another 32,000 ballots were cast early. If the county misses the certification deadline, the secretary of state’s office or a candidate could go to court and ask a judge to force the board to certify the results. The deadline is in state law, and election rules based on that law say county clerks must certify and cannot change the results. The Pima County judge who heard the previous case because local judges declared a conflict will also hear the new lawsuit. Judge Casey McGinley set a day hearing for next Friday. The lawsuit also states that Republican County Attorney Brian McIntyre “has made it clear that he will prosecute the Board and Recorder to exercise their legal authority to take custody of the ballots to complete an extensive hand count.” . McIntyre has repeatedly told the board in recent weeks that their efforts would be illegal, as has Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the state’s top elections official and Democratic governor-elect. Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, however, issued an informal opinion supporting the board. An attorney for Marra said Tuesday that her client had not formally served, but had just begun considering the lawsuit. An official response will likely come soon. Marra conducted the required hand count screening Saturday, as did other counties across the state. These controls sample both election day and early voting. Bipartisan panels of volunteers provided by the county’s Democratic and Republican party chairmen count four races — five in a presidential election year. Marra’s certification to Hobbs’ office states that two lots of early ballots and two lots of Election Day ballots from two polling centers were counted, totaling 2,202 ballots. The hand count results matched the machine number exactly.
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