Arizona’s attorney general on Tuesday appealed to stop the transfer of election duties in rural counties whose leaders embrace voter conspiracy theories.
The Republican majority of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted last week to transfer all election functions from the bipartisan elections division to the county’s elected Republican registrar. Following the resignation of an election director who opposed the board’s efforts to conduct a full handcount.
Attorney General Chris Mays said it was illegal to change his job from an elections office to a registrar.
“While counties can properly enter into cooperative agreements with recorders to administer elections, Cochise County’s agreement goes far beyond legal boundaries,” Mays said in a news release announcing the lawsuit. said.
Mays argued that the agreement was not a “hand-in-hand” agreement to work with the county’s three supervisors, and that it improperly empowered county registrar David Stevens. Two of the county’s Republican supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, voted in favor of the deal, but Ann English, the only Democrat on the board, voted against it.
Crosby and Judd said they believed the transfer was legal under Arizona law and had little choice after election chief Lisa Mara resigned last month, citing threats and intimidation.
The lawsuit is the latest between the state and Republican oversight officials in Cochise over their acceptance of unorthodox election procedures, stemming from a conspiracy theory popularized by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 defeat. It’s just a legal battle.
During the November 2022 election, at the urging of Crosby and Judd, Stevens was prepared to hand-count all votes until a judge stopped it. They refused to prove the results, blaming the statewide victory by Mays and other Democrats for tort in Maricopa County.
Stevens is a friend of former Arizona Republican Congressman Mark Finkem, who attended a rally ahead of the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. He ran for secretary of state, the state’s highest electoral post, but lost last year. Stevens recently agreed to serve on the board of an election-related nonprofit founded by Finchem.
In Arizona, registrars have already done some election work. Print ballots, mail them, and verify signatures on returned ballots. However, elections offices that report to county supervisors handle tallies and election day ballots.
