On Wednesday, two Republicans who control the board in a rural county in southeastern Arizona told a judge they wanted to drop the lawsuit they filed two days ago. The lawsuit sought to force their election officials to hand-count all ballots cast directly. election day.

In court filings, one Cochise County Republican overseer said he didn’t want to interfere with the Arizona Attorney General’s potential recount.

Democrat Chris Mays led Republican Abraham Hamadeh by well below the recount’s margin as of late Wednesday afternoon.

Congress changed state election recount laws this year, significantly raising the bar for mandatory recounts.

Recounting is now required if candidates are within 0.5% of each other. About 12,500 votes are the trigger for the election of the Attorney General.

Supervisor Peggy Judd told the Associated Press that she and supervisor Tom Crosby have agreed to drop the lawsuit filed Monday against elections official Lisa Mara.

This is triggered when the state accepts election certificates from all 15 Arizona counties and the statewide vote totals are accepted.

“We had to walk away from everything we were going to do and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got to put this into action,'” said Judd. “Because interfering with[Mara]is the last thing we want to do.”

Mara’s attorney, Christina Estes Waterl, said she expects a speedy decision from the Pima County judge who is hearing the case.

The move to hand-count ballots in the Republican-heavy county, home to the iconic Old West town of Tombstone, has been linked to former President Donald Trump and widespread fraud and voting machine abuse in the last presidential election. He gained momentum from false allegations by his supporters of conspiracy theories.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines during the 2020 or this year’s midterm elections.

Nonetheless, conspiracy theories spread widely, sparking heated public rallies in most rural counties in the West amid calls to abolish voting machines in favor of paper ballots and full handcounts.

The controversy led to a near delay in certifying primary results earlier this year in one New Mexico county, and an ongoing legal battle over full handcounts in a Nevada county.

Crosby and Judd wanted to hand-count all 12,000 votes on Election Day and about 32,000 that were cast before the deadline. But in a ruling triggered by a lawsuit filed by a retiree group, the judge said state law prohibits expanding the usual 1% count audit of early voting.

He said the 2% expansion of election day votes, which are usually tallied to test the accuracy of vote-counting machines, must be random.

Judd and Crosby then proposed counting 99% of all votes on Election Day, ending the votes from 16 of the county’s 17 polling stations.

A prosecutor in a Republican-elected county told them they would be committing a felony if they tried to retrieve the ballot from Mara, who refused to accompany them.

Judd said Wednesday that he wanted to end the fight with Mara and let her keep her job. “We’re trying to get along with her,” Judd said. “She was really afraid of us for a while.”

Judd said the Attorney General’s mechanical recount of the race accomplishes most of what their full hand count was designed to do, perhaps including others.

“I think we did all the damage or good. I’m not saying it was all the damage. I think some good came out of this,” Judd said. “But we did the best we could.”

Cochise County’s handcount battle threatened to delay the required statewide certification set on December 5th.