Arizona is moving ahead to reverse a near-total abortion ban that’s been on the books since 1864 after the state Senate narrowly voted on Wednesday to repeal the law, revived last month by the state Supreme Court.
The vote passed 16-14, with two Republicans joining the Democrats to send the bill to the governor’s desk. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has said she will sign the legislation.
During the vote, several Republicans criticized the Democrats for “fast-tracking” the legislation through the chamber and called out their two GOP colleagues who voted “yes” on the bill.
The Senate vote follows multiple attempts by the Arizona state House to pass a repeal. Democrats secured enough support from Republican colleagues last week to clear the bill on the third attempt in as many weeks.
Republicans hold a narrow majority in both branches of the Arizona Legislature.
The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in early April ruling that the 1864 ban was enforceable sparked national outcry. Lawmakers in the battleground state have been grappling with the ban ever since, with Democrats pushing for a repeal and Republicans fielding pressure from powerful figures, like former President Donald Trump, to undo the political damage it could have caused in a crucial election year.
The ban was set to go into effect after June 8 at the earliest. The near-total abortion ban will be officially repealed 90 days after Hobbs signs it into law, after which the previous 15-week ban will be reinstated.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
The Arizona GOP has selected state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a “fake elector” indicted last week and accused of working to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona, as a national committeeman for the Republican National Committee.
Hoffman — who was indicted Wednesday along with 17 other people, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — was elected to the RNC post along with former state Rep. Liz Harris, who was expelled for reasons related to questioning Biden’s 2020 victory in Arizona.
“I’m humbled and honored to have been elected as the next RNC National Committeeman for Arizona,” Hoffman wrote Saturday evening on X.
“The road to saving America runs through our great state, and the RNC has a crucial role to play in supporting and empowering the Republican grassroots who fight every day against the Democratic Fascists,” Hoffman added.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Hoffman, then days away from becoming a state representative, sent a letter urging Vice President Mike Pence to delay the counting of Arizona’s electors and to “seek clarification from the Arizona legislature as to which slate of electors were proper and accurate.” Hoffman himself was one of the 11 “alternate electors.”
Announcing the charges against Hoffman and others accused of being involved in the scheme, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said in a recorded video released Wednesday, “These defendants deceived the citizens of Arizona.”
“The defendants intended that the false votes for Trump and Pence would encourage Vice President Pence to reject the certified Biden-Harris electors’ votes regardless of the result of any legal challenge,” she added.
Along with Hoffman, the Arizona GOP also selected former state Rep. Liz Harris as a national committeewoman. Harris was expelled from the Legislature a year ago after she invited an election denier to provide testimony laced with unsubstantiated allegations at a televised legislative hearing on elections.
Jacqueline Breger, an insurance agent whom Harris invited to testify, claimed without evidence that a Mexican drug cartel bribed Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican House Speaker Ben Toma and that “bribes and infiltration have been used to affect the outcome” of the 2020 and 2022 elections.
At the controversial hearing on Feb. 23, 2023, Breger claimed that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “control[s]” government agencies and was “integral to the laundering activities.”
An Arizona ethics panel report found Harris “committed disorderly behavior” and damaged “the institutional integrity of the House” by inviting Breger. Harris was removed from office after 46 of the 60 members of the Republican-controlled House voted to expel her upon the release of the ethics panel report.
“These are not just your run-of-the-mill election deniers,” Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said of Hoffman and Harris. “They are leaders in the whole experiment of election denialism.”
Marson said he believes Hoffman’s and Harris’ new gigs are indicative of the Arizona GOP’s transformation in recent years.
“I think it shows that both election denialism and a fealty to election denialism is now the state Republican Party in Arizona,” he said.
The Arizona GOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the selections of Hoffman and Harris.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
(Reuters) – Rudy Giuliani, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, is among 18 people charged in Arizona with illegally seeking to claim the state’s 2020 electoral votes for the then-U.S. president, in an indictment that names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.
The indictment, reached on Tuesday and unsealed on Wednesday, stems from the attempt by Trump and his allies to pressure election officials in several states to overturn the presidential election won by Joe Biden, efforts for which Trump has been indicted in Georgia and in federal court.
The court papers list “a former U.S. president,” referring to Trump, as an unindicted co-conspirator.
The indictment in Maricopa County Superior Court names 11 defendants and redacts the names of seven others. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a press release announcing the charges that those names would be made public after all of the defendants had been served with the indictment.
Giuliani is among those whose names are redacted, a spokesperson for him, Ted Goodman, confirmed, criticizing the prosecution of the former New York mayor as political.
Another defendant whose name was redacted is described in the indictment as chief of staff in 2020, the position Mark Meadows held in the Trump White House at that time.
Representatives for Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the indictment.
INDICTMENT FOLLOWS GEORGIA, FEDERAL CASES
Trump, Giuliani and Meadows are co-defendants in the Georgia case, where they are charged with a racketeering conspiracy to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. They have pleaded not guilty there. Trump has also pleaded not guilty in the federal election-subversion case in Washington.
Trump, a Republican, says all the cases are a political “witch hunt” to prevent him from defeating Democrat Biden in this year’s presidential rematch.
Another defendant whose name is redacted is Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung confirmed, calling the Arizona indictment “another example of Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system.”
“Christina Bobb is a former Marine Corps officer, who served our nation and the President with distinction. The Democrat platform for 2024: if you can’t beat them, try to throw them in jail,” Cheung said.
Giuliani spokesperson Goodman also called the Arizona indictment an example of “the continued weaponization of our justice system,” saying it “should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani – one of the most effective prosecutors in American history who took down the Mafia, cleaned up the streets of New York and locked up corrupt public officials – is proud to stand up for the countless Americans who raised legitimate concerns surrounding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election,” Goodman said.
The indictment alleges the defendants pressured the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, the Arizona Legislature and then-Governor Doug Ducey to change the election results.
FALSE ELECTORS SCHEME IN SEVERAL STATES
U.S. presidents are chosen by electors from each state, who cast votes in the Electoral College, where votes are allotted based on each state’s population.
In Arizona and almost all other states, the winner of the state’s popular vote receives all of that state’s electoral votes. To win the presidency a candidate needs 270 electoral votes – a majority of total 538.
Arizona has 11 electoral votes, and the 11 defendants named in the indictment would correspond to those people who purported to be electors for Trump.
Arizona is one of seven states where Biden won but Trump allies sought to award the electoral votes to Trump. Many of the races were close. Arizona was decided by little more than 10,000 votes or 0.3% of the ballots cast.
The charges include fraud, forgery and conspiracy, three classes of felony that with a conviction could have sentences ranging from 6 months to more than 12 years in prison.
Arizona is the fourth U.S. state where participants in the elector scheme have faced criminal charges.
Three people who held themselves out as Trump electors in Georgia were charged alongside Trump in the sweeping racketeering case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Sixteen people who falsely claimed to be legitimate Trump electors in Michigan were indicted in July 2023 by state Attorney General Dana Nessel. Authorities in Nevada charged six people, including the state Republican chair, with taking part in the scheme.
The so-called fake elector plan also plays a prominent role in the federal case against Trump brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accusing the former president of a multi-part scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump will press his claim that he should be immune from those charges at the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.
Besides Meadows, Giuliani and Bobb, the other defendants whose names were redacted were three attorneys and the director of election day operations for the Trump campaign. The unindicted co-conspirators also include were two former members of the Arizona legislature and two former attorneys for the Trump campaign.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward, Daniel Trotta, Eric Beech and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by William Mallard)
Officials in the state’s largest county are concerned a provision in a newly passed election law may delay election night results by hours in November.
The new statute was designed to ensure the state’s recently widened recount margin won’t disrupt this year’s elections. Getting it through the Arizona Legislature required compromises from election officials — including one that stipulates counties must count the number of early ballots received at each of their voting sites and report those figures to the public on election night.
County officials said that isn’t a fast process. It could leave election staffers across the state struggling to report results as politicians, pundits and the public eagerly await early tallies.
Deputy County Manager Zach Schira said it took poll workers an average of 30 to 45 minutes to pile up early ballots and count them by hand during last week’s presidential preference election, which saw low turnout.
Elections: Federal official says Arizona ‘in the crosshairs’ of election threats
“We’ll likely have three to five times that volume in November,” Schira said.
He said accuracy is another concern. Poll workers reported 31,174 early ballots in Tuesday’s election night count. But machines that scanned and tallied the unopened early ballots put the real total at 33,155.
A few polling sites didn’t report an early ballot tally to county officials, Schira said. That could be because those sites didn’t receive any early ballot drop-offs on election day, or because poll workers forgot to tally them on election night.
The scanned total of early ballots also included those placed into the county’s outdoor drop boxes and picked up from the U.S. Postal Service at the end of election day, which Schira said weren’t required to be hand tallied. That could help explain the discrepancy.
But state Rep. Alex Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, said the 2,000 ballot difference was “weird.” He pledged to “look into why that is” and defended the potential election night delays as “well worth it” to increase transparency.
“I would much rather know if the count’s off… and wait half an hour to 35 minutes to find that out,” said Kolodin, an election lawyer who was one of the key negotiators of the new statute. “That’s pretty concerning.”
Is hand counting accurate? Previous tests suggest not
Schira said hand counting is known to be “fallible.” He noted poll workers must count the early ballots at the end of a long, stressful day amid a “high stakes period of time” in which they must also shut down polling sites, fill out chain of custody forms and ensure all voting materials and equipment heads back to county election officials.
“Humans aren’t perfect,” Schira said. “And there’s a good chance that they’ll never be perfect in those hand counts.”
Trials have repeatedly shown hand counting is less accurate, more expensive and far slower than counting with tabulators.
A report from Mohave County concluded it would take one group of seven people about 657 eight-hour days to tally all of the 105,000 ballots cast in the 2020 General Election, not including the extra time needed to correct any errors or to consider votes for write-in candidates. The effort could cost upward of $1 million, said Mohave County Elections Director Allen Tempert.
Arizona politics: Maricopa County recorder seeks sanctions for Kari Lake in defamation suit
Former Pinal County Elections Director Geraldine Roll began a trial hand count of 2,000 test ballots from the 2022 election before abruptly leaving her position. She found each batch of 25 ballots took her team about 80 minutes to count.
And amid the Arizona Senate’s high-profile “audit” of the 2020 presidential race results in Maricopa County, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan admitted in text messages that he couldn’t accurately tally a hand count of the county’s 2.1 million ballots, noting the numbers were “screwy.”
Schira said he worries an intense focus on any election discrepancies in battleground Arizona will result in harassment of election staffers. Maricopa County anonymized polling locations in a results document detailing the hand tallies of early ballots on Tuesday night.
Incident forms filled out by poll workers in 2022 show frontline election workers are already facing threats and politically charged disruptions at voting sites.
“We don’t want poll workers targeted or locations targeted because they were off,” he said.
Workers at the Maricopa County Election Center watch supporters of President Donald Trump protest in front of their office in Phoenix Nov. 4, 2020. The group was asking for a fair vote count.
Will the provision increase voter confidence or erode trust?
Kolodin said the early ballot count is designed to improve voter trust in Arizona’s electoral system. He pointed to the 2,000 ballot discrepancy in Maricopa County’s early ballot numbers as an example of the new legislation working as intended.
“Many in the ‘everything is fine with elections camp’ think that voter confidence is served by just sweeping problems under the rug,” Kolodin said. “I tend to think it’s different… For me, finding problems like this is very much a point of the bill.”
But result drops already often stretch into the early hours of the morning, meaning election officials must work gruelingly long shifts. That’s a function of the complex closing procedures poll workers must complete before transporting ballots and other materials back to county election headquarters.
The size of the jurisdictions also can delay early tallies. Coconino County, Arizona’s largest by land area, spans more than 18,600 square miles in the northern part of the state.
As electoral distrust has grown, election officials have been repeatedly accused of counting ballots too slowly — both on election night and in the days after. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake falsely alleged Maricopa County officials were intentionally slowing down vote counting in 2022. Any increased delay could amplify those concerns.
Schira said the new law passed after the county had concluded its poll worker training for Tuesday’s election. He intends to include processes for the early ballot count in future staff training. It’s a move both he and Kolodin said could improve wait times for results.
“Between now and July, there’s a chance we get better at this,” Schira said. “But I don’t know how significantly… it’s still people hand counting at the end of a very, very long shift.”
He added: “If you get this right, then it increases transparency. Over time, with training and implementing the process, if we can get this to a place where it’s efficient and effective, then that’s an improvement to the system and we are unopposed to that.”
Sasha Hupka covers county government and election administration for The Arizona Republic. Do you have a tip to share on elections or voting? Reach her at sasha.hupka@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @SashaHupka. Follow her on Instagram or Threads: @sashahupkasnaps.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Maricopa County could see delayed election results
