Officials in rural Cochise County, Arizona, on Thursday certified the results of the county’s midterm election — ending a high-stakes standoff with state officials over the county’s failure to sign election results by the legal deadline.
The 2-0 vote came shortly after a judge ordered the county’s three-member board of supervisors to certify the results by 5 p.m. local time.
Cochise was the last of Arizona’s 15 counties to ratify the election. The standoff between Republican officials in the county and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and the state’s governor-elect, had drawn national attention as a symbol of how deeply election misinformation had taken root in pockets of the country since the 2020 election.
The two Republicans on the three-member board had delayed the certification because of concerns about whether the vote-counting machines were properly certified. The Secretary of State’s Office said the machines had been tested and certified and argued that reckless board members were promoting debunked conspiracy theories.
Arizona’s statewide certification of results is set to take place on Monday.
Peggy Judd, one of the Republican supervisors who originally voted to delay the certification, said Thursday that she was “not ashamed of anything I did” but voted yes in response to the court order. She was joined by the lone Democrat on the Cochise Board of Supervisors, Chairwoman Ann English, to certify the results.
English said those who wanted to change the way elections were conducted needed to lobby the Legislature to change state law. “We’re responding to the legislature,” he said. “We are not creating legislation for the state.”
The third board member, Republican Tom Crosby, did not attend the meeting.
Earlier Thursday, Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley told supervisors they had a “non-discretionary” duty to carry out the certification.
Hobbs, along with a group of retirees, had sued to force the board to certify the results. The board’s initial delay risked disenfranchising about 47,000 voters, Hobbs said.
McGinley said any concerns supervisors or the public might have about the vote counting machines “were no reason to delay the canvass” of the results.
His decision followed weeks of controversy in this Republican stronghold, as the board’s GOP majority sought to register its disapproval of the machines. At one point, the two Republican supervisors on the three-member board pushed, unsuccessfully, to hold a broad recount of November’s general election results.
Arizona has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories since President Joe Biden flipped the once reliably red state in 2020, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the Grand Canyon State in nearly a quarter century. Public meetings in Cochise and elsewhere have seen huge demands for local officials to exercise their mostly ministerial certification functions to overturn the election.
Earlier this year, a court ordered the certification of primary election results in Otero County, New Mexico, after a local council voted against certification, saying they did not trust the counting machines.
“On the one hand, this is a hyperlocal issue,” said Ryan Snow, counsel for the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law. “But on the other hand, it also goes to the heart of what it means to live in a democracy. You have to be able to rely on voting and counting.”
“From 2020, we have a new battle in the fight for our democracy, which is: After the votes are recorded, if they are to be certified,” he added.
During Thursday’s hearing, Crosby sought to delay the proceedings to allow an attorney the supervisors had hired hours before the hearing to prepare. The judge denied that request.
English, the board president, pleaded with the judge to force the supervisors to act quickly. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “I think the public has had enough.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
