The NPR Politics Podcast - Will Arizona Officials Face Charges For Vote Certification Delay?

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Under a court order, officials in Republican-controlled Cochise County, Ariz., finally certified their local midterm elections results after they missed the state's legal deadline and put more than 47,000 people's votes at risk. A bipartisan pair of former officials in the state are calling for the two members who initially voted against certification to be criminally investigated.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, voting correspondent Hansi Lo Wang, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Katherine Swartz.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Note: A previous version of the story's audio contained the wrong date for an Arizona election certification deadline. The deadline was November 28, not November 8.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Kerry in Oregon, where I just finished one hour of get-out-the-vote calling for the runoff election in Georgia. This podcast was recorded at 1 26 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, the 6th of December. Things may have changed by the time you heard this, but campaigning for the 2022 midterm elections should be over. Enjoy the show. Woohoo. Let it end. Let it end. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Hansi Lewong. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. The last big outstanding race of the midterms will be settled today with the runoff election in Georgia's U.S. Senate race. And in many other places, last month's election

results have been certified or in the process of being certified. It's the sort of pro forma step that most of us never thought about in any serious way until a couple of years ago. But in one Arizona county this year, what happened is anything but routine. Hansi, you've been following this. What happened in Cochise County? And how is it supposed to work? What happened instead? Well, more than 47,000 voters cast their ballots for this year's general midterm elections in this county in the southeastern corner of arizona near tucson cochise county and local election officials they counted and

reviewed these ballots they found no legitimate problems so according to arizona state law the cochise county board of supervisors was supposed to meet and vote and certify these results make them official and basically pass them along to the state's top election official, the Secretary of State for the statewide certification. But two Republicans on this board delayed the local certification process and forced the county to miss this legal deadline. They claimed they wanted to delay because of concerns about the county's voting equipment, but state officials confirmed this equipment was tested and properly certified. And later, one of these Republicans, Peggy Judd, told The New York Times that those claims were basically a cover for the delay because what they really wanted to do was protest the certification of results in Arizona's Maricopa County. So this was a protest. This is what Peggy Judd told The New York Times. So this all does feel a little bit procedural, like they missed a procedural deadline.

But it is worth saying outright that this certification, this sort of certification, is one of the most important things we talk about on this podcast. Certifying legitimate election results, respecting the will of the voters, that's what democracy is. And it seems that that's what these folks were trying to stand in the way of. Yeah. You know, what was at stake here was tens of thousands of people's votes. And, you know, after most people vote, you know, they hear about who's projected to win and they've tuned out, you know, for them, elections are over. But elections are not over until the votes are certified. And that key step has not really received a lot of attention in recent elections until 2020.

You know, during then President Donald Trump's failed attempt to overturn President Biden's win in Michigan, in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit, two Republican members at the local board of canvassers. They voted at first against certifying the results. They ultimately agreed to certify and broke a tie vote after public pressure. And this year, there was a controversy over certification during the primaries in New Mexico's Otero County. Republicans, again, voted not to certify initially and had to be ordered by the state Supreme Court to comply with state law and make those results official. So, you know, there are growing signs here that certifying results, this is another step in the election process that can be vulnerable to election deniers and attempts to undermine democracy.

So if these county supervisors had succeeded, what would have happened? Would these 47,000 people have been disenfranchised? Would their votes not have counted? There was a potential scenario here that if these Republican county officials in Cochise County did not vote to certify by a certain date, more than 47,000 people's votes would have effectively been thrown in the trash and not counted in Arizona's official results for the midterm elections because state law sets deadlines for statewide certification. And presumably, if this was a Republican county, it would have hurt the Republican candidates. So that's what's confusing about this. They weren't trying necessarily to control the outcome in a partisan way. They were doing this as a protest to gum up the whole process, right? And stop a winner from being declared statewide? You know, it's not exactly clear what exactly was going

through their minds in terms of their strategy and what they hope to get out of this, because it was such a chaotic few days in Cochise County, where, you know, the Arizona Secretary of State, now officially governor-elect Katie Hobbs, sued the county supervisors, so did a nonprofit group and a Cochise County voter, and they eventually were taken to court, and it was not a good day for them. Yeah, describe what happened in court. What was argument? What what did the judge end up saying? from the county's total. And this was a very dramatic hearing because for days it was not clear if these Cochise County supervisors had a lawyer to represent them because the county's attorney told the supervisors that he couldn't represent them whenever they had broken the law. So they had to find a lawyer and they only approved a law firm less than two hours before

their court hearing. And then at that hearing, their lawyer didn't show up in court. So Hansi, this is a type of election subversion, right? I mean, you're on the beat that monitors all the kinds of activity that can undermine free and fair elections. And we've talked a lot about voter suppression, making it harder for people to vote on the front end. But this is about potentially decertifying votes on the back end. I'm surprised we didn't see a lot more of this,

given how many election conspiracy theorists were running, and also given how much Donald Trump's message to Republicans about not accepting results that they didn't like was prevalent this year. Yeah, you know, going into the midterms, a lot of election watchers were worried about certification troubles because of New Mexico's Otero County during the primaries, there was that delay. And so far, this controversy over certifying election results in this general election season has mainly been in Arizona. But for the most part, in most other parts of the country, this has been a relatively smooth process. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll have more in a second. And we're back. And Hansi, I'm wondering, these Republican county officials that

held up the certification of the election in Cochise County, Arizona, in theory, they violated the law. So will there be any legal consequences for doing that? That's the big question right now. The Secretary of State's office has asked for an investigation by Arizona's Attorney General and the Cochise County attorney, because, again, these Republican officials almost disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in their own county. And I talked to a former attorney general of Arizona, Terry Goddard, who's a Democrat. And Goddard joined a former Maricopa County attorney who's a Republican. And they've been calling for an investigation because they say these Republican officials likely broke at least three criminal laws by willfully refusing to do their legal duty to certify the election results. And Goddard said, you know, even though

the county ended up certifying the results late under a court order, he thinks these Republicans should still be held accountable. And have they responded, these officials? Right before one of these Republican supervisors ultimately voted to certify Peggy Judd, she said before voting to certify that, quote, I am not ashamed of anything I did. And the other Republican in Cochise County, Tom Crosby, did not show up at the board's meeting that the judge had ordered them to hold in order to certify the results. So that's their reaction. There it is. I do want to ask you about the gubernatorial candidate, Carrie Lake. She was the Republican candidate running against Secretary of State, the Democrat, Katie Hobbs, who is now governor-elect. Carrie Lake has not given up on pushing forward in a very Trump-like fashion.

She's been talking about filing a lawsuit. Where does that stand? Is she building a movement of some kind? Or otherwise, does she have the ability to hold up the certification or make a case of it? Well, statewide certification of Arizona's midterm election results has happened. That has taken place. So that's official. And so we'll have to see what Carrie Lake ultimately files in court and what legal challenge her campaign, she herself tries to bring and on what grounds and how that could play out. But in terms of what the results say,

those results are official in Arizona at this point. So we've been talking about Cochise County in Arizona, but Hansi, is this an isolated incident in the 2022 midterms? This was not an isolated incident. It certainly was the most dramatic incident. But in Arizona's Mojave County, the Republicans there waited until the last day to certify. They delayed because they said they wanted to make a political statement, but they ultimately didn't meet that deadline. And in Pennsylvania County in northeastern Pennsylvania, Luzerne County, they ultimately certified two days late after Republican officials there voted against certifying by the deadline and the board deadlocked along party lines because one of the Democrats decided not to vote initially. So this has been happening in two swing states. Mara, we can count on one hand or fewer than the

fingers on one hand, the number of cases that that happened in this past election. In the lead up to this election, people were watching nervously, afraid that there would be widespread election subversion, or that more people would refuse to concede, or that there would be more chaos. So are you surprised that it can be counted on one hand? I am surprised. I mean, given the hold that Donald Trump has on the activist wing of his party and how strongly he said basically, you know, he wasn't willing to accept the results of elections unless he won them. It looked like the Republican Party was on the way to being the party that would only accept elections as legitimate if they were the winners.

So I am surprised. Maybe there's something unique about Donald Trump that not everyone else has the ability to mobilize massive numbers of people to come out and protest or file dozens and dozens of lawsuits. But I think it goes under the category of being surprised at how poorly the MAGA candidates did and how well the Democrats did and how much voters in general rejected extreme politics this year. Yeah, I guess to pull back even further, you know, in 2020, we talked a lot about the guardrails holding tenuously, but they held. Yeah, by the skin of their teeth, Democratic institutions have withstood the stress test. That is Donald Trump.

Yes. And it seems as though that has occurred again this year. I agree with that. Democratic institutions are decentralized and there is no one election authority that one person could control or corrupt. And so far, we haven't had the kind of mass failure of little d democratic institutions. That doesn't mean that they're not constantly under attack, or that Hansi isn't going to have a whole bunch of stuff to cover next year. Well, and that's my final question, Hansi. What are you, you know, you talk to people who watch this for a living, whose job it is to worry about this stuff.

What are they worried about for future elections? What are the experts that you talk to looking out for in 2024? Well, let's bring it back to Cochise County. Many election watchers around the country are watching to see what happens to these Republican supervisors. Will they be held accountable? Will there be an investigation? Because if there is no accountability here for what they did, it could encourage a lot of election watchers are telling me it could encourage election deniers in other parts of the country to try to delay or stop their certification process in 2024 and in other future elections. So we'll have to see exactly how this turns out. And it could be a sign that election deniers may see it as an invitation to try to do more of this.

Well, let us leave it there for today. We will be watching right along with those election watchers. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Hansi Lewong. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.