Arizona officials accused of conspiring to delay election results
Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were charged Wednesday with misdemeanor charges in connection with their efforts to delay the certification of the 2022 election results.
Kris Mayes, the state’s attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three Cochise County supervisors, face charges of interference with an election official and conspiracycriticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”
Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby tried to order a manual count of ballots cast in Cochise, a sparsely populated and heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories advanced by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay the certification of the election before ultimately relenting under pressure from a court order.
The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw the regulators’ machinations as a troubling precedent. As Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became widely accepted within the Republican Party, local Republican officials began a number of closely contested states used suspicion of the electoral system on the right to justify delaying the certification of the 2022 election results.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Judd said she didn’t actually suspect there were voting irregularities in Cochise County. She characterized the move as a protest against election certification in Maricopa, the large urban county that includes Phoenix, where right-wing activists had made a series of unproven claims of malfeasance.
“In our small counties we are tired of being shouted at and disrespected,” Ms Judd said.
Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the supervisors last November, arguing that their protest, which threatened to delay the statewide election, would disenfranchise the county’s voters. (The third county supervisor, Ann English, a Democrat, has opposed the others’ actions.) Republican candidates lost their races for most of the top statewide contests in the Arizona election, in which Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat was elected governor.
In October, the local Herald/review newspaper and Voice beat reported that Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby had been subpoenaed by Ms. Mayes, a Democrat elected last year, to appear before a state grand jury in the attorney general’s investigation.
While local Republican officials who have interfered with election systems in other states since 2020 have faced criminal charges on other grounds, the charges against Cochise are the first criminal charges filed over a refusal to certify an election.
Jared Davidson, an attorney for Protect Democracy, a watchdog group, argued that the prosecution could set an important precedent.
“Insisting on possible criminal liability sends an important message, not just to election deniers in Arizona, but across the country, that when they indulge in conspiracy theories, ignore the law and attempt to disenfranchise voters, there are real consequences,” he said.