Despite a draft decision written by one of the Cochise County judges, the three judges who heard the case appeared to largely agree. The lawsuit, on appeal by Cochise County officials, was blocked by a first-instance judge against a plan to have ballots counted entirely by hand in last year’s general election.

Attorney Aria Branch told the commission that Arizona’s election law, which governs how small-scale manual tally audits are conducted to check the accuracy of machine vote tallies, would allow He said it would be useless if every ballot could be counted by hand. Branch represents the Arizona Association of Retired Americans, which has filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction on Cochise County’s count.

“Full hand calculations are only allowed if there are problems with electronic aggregation,” Branch said. “It’s not something we take for granted.”

But Cochise County Attorneys Veronica Lucero and Brian Brem disagreed. They argued that the state’s election law requires a minimum number of early votes to be audited, and that the county requires more votes to ensure that the oversight board has sufficient results to certify the election. and counting all votes manually.

Brehm told the judge that state law sets only a minimum number of early votes to be audited.

But Judge Peter J. Eckerstrom cut him off.

“Let me stop there,” Eckerstrom told Bremm. He said the “plain language” in the law covering early voting audits “provides that the maximum number of early votes that can be audited in the first instance is 5,000.”

Brehm countered that county commissions do not simply exist to approve election results handed to them by election staff.

“They must swear that it is true and correct,” he said. “And to do that, we need to educate ourselves as to whether it is true and correct.”

The final decision the Court of Appeals will make will have a significant impact on the Arizona election.

Republicans are pushing for manual counting in several Arizona counties, fueled by former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations that vote-counting machines are inaccurate, but so far none have followed suit. no.

If the Court of Appeals sided with Cochise County’s Republican-led board of directors and county registrar David Stevens, hundreds of people would be required to manually count tens of thousands of ballots in the 2024 election. of volunteers need to be mobilized.

This could delay accreditation, and Branch told the Court of Appeals judges that a machine tally would be more accurate than a human tally of multiple races per ballot. Because it is a well-known fact, it is possible to get two separate results.

Other Republican-led counties will almost certainly follow Cochise County’s example. Mojave County regulators are considering eliminating tally machines altogether ahead of next year’s election, but are facing opposition from Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

The Manual of State Election Procedures, a roadmap for county elections administrators that provides detailed guidance for conducting elections under state law, specifically states that counties can expand manual count audits of early voting. It is described in. More than 80% of the ballots cast in Arizona are cast early, and different audit rules apply to the remaining ballots cast in person on Election Day.

Branch said former Attorney General Mark Brunovich’s informal opinion last year that counties could count all ballots by hand was overturned by new Attorney General Chris Mays, and he was replaced. He said the appeals court could sidestep the issue by referring to what happened.

And Gov. Katie Hobbs, who signed the 2019 manual when she was secretary of state, told the court that the fee clause violated the law and should be ignored.

According to Branch, full counts are not permitted due to state law that overrides the election procedure manual.

Fontes, a Democrat like Mays, is currently working on a new version of the manual. Fontes spokesman Paul Smith Leonard declined to say Tuesday whether the clause would be removed, but Branch told the judge it would.

“We have good reason to believe that the (manual of election procedures), which will be released at the end of the year, will remove the statement that counties have additional discretionary powers,” Branch said. “Because all state officials, attorneys general, governors and secretaries of state involved in the EPM process all agree that the line should be disabled because it violates state law.”