PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has been blocked from using a new provision of the election procedures manual that would have let him certify election results in the state if a county refuses to sign off on its own results.
In a decision Friday, U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi said that under the rule all votes in a given county could be excluded if its officials fail to certify the results. The provision, the judge said, would give Fontes “nearly carte blanche authority to disenfranchise the ballots of potentially millions of Arizona voters.”
Two officials from a largely Republican county in Arizona delayed the certification of midterm election results in 2022, leading the attorney general to bring felony charges against them. Then-Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now Arizona’s governor, warned that she might have to certify statewide results without numbers from Cochise County if they weren’t received in time, an outcome that would have tipped the balance of several close races.