Cochise County suckers - er, supervisors - 'shall' face charges for ignoring election law
At long last, we are getting a glimpse at what lies ahead for some of Arizona’s suckers ... oops, I mean leaders … who took a tumble down the stolen election rabbit hole.
A jail cell.
The state grand jury on Monday indicted Cochise County Supervisors Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby for refusing to follow state law and certify the county’s elections results.
As Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre advised them they must.
Alas, the supervisors listened not to their own attorney’s legal advice but to the insistent demands of the MAGA crowd, convinced (as always) that skullduggery was afoot.
2 supervisors refused to certify the vote
Judd and Crosby now stand accused of two felonies: conspiracy and interference with an election officer.The two Republican supervisors drew national attention last fall they refused to certify the 2022 vote, as the law required, saying they weren’t satisfied that the tabulation machines were properly certified. (They were.)
Judd and Crosby had this bright this idea that if they just declined to certify the election results in their ruby-red county that …
Well, I’m not sure what they really thought would happen, but their decision to essentially disenfranchise their own voters — most of them Republicans — seemed to be a protest of Maricopa County’s election.
A protest that, had it stood, could have put another Democrat in Congress.
Without Cochise County’s vote, Republican Juan Ciscomani would have lost his southern Arizona race to Democrat Kirsten Engel.
Kari Lake wanted someone to go to jail
Fortunately for Ciscomani and the county’s 47,000 voters whose votes would not have counted had Team Cochise Crazy prevailed, a judge ordered the supervisors to certify the election, which finally happened two days after the deadline set by state law.
Kari Lake, for her part, seemed quite happy at the time for those supervisors to become felons and spend some quality time behind bars.
“I wish somebody would say, ’You know what? Arrest me then. I don’t care,’ ” the then-Republican gubernatorial candidate said, as the supervisors were still holding out and the deadline for canvassing the vote passed.
A sinister attack on elections: Is underway. Don't let it prevail
“We need people with courage to say, ’Class what felony? Go ahead, go for it, arrest me.’ Because this is a botched election.”
This week, Lake got her wish as the two supervisors were indicted and now face a pair of class five felonies.
The law is clear, and Lake? Now she's quiet
Hard right legislators are irate, with some calling for the impeachment of Attorney General Kris Mayes, who announced the indictment.
Sen., Jake Hoffman, chairman of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, called it a "disgusting weaponization" of the AG's Office for political purposes.
"This is ELECTION INTERFERENCE by an extremist AG who wants to chill any future efforts by local election officials to challenge potentially inaccurate elections," he wrote, in a post to social media.
Yet Arizona law is clear about certifying elections.
ARS 16-642 says county supervisors “shall” certify the election within 20 days of the vote — meaning by Nov. 28, 2022.
It doesn’t say they can refuse to certify the vote to protest another county’s printer problems. It doesn’t say they can toss the ballots of their own 47,000 voters into the trash because they’re angry that Lake and company lost the election.
It says shall.
So now those two supervisors shall face the possibility of prison.
And Lake?
She was silent in the hours after Mayes announced the indictment on Wednesday, having moved on to running for the Senate.
Suckers.
Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at @laurierobertsaz.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Cochise County supervisors could pay for ignoring election law
