Good day all. The debacle of the Arizona elections continues to reverberate. I’ve been writing about Maricopa County and the mess of their election process. There were other counties as well that had issues, including Mohave County. Because of these issues, they hesitated to certify their election results.
This set off Katie Hobbs. She’s “technically” the winner of the governor’s race, however, there are a number of issues that have popped up. In any case, she is also the Secretary of State and her job is to oversee the election process. When Mohave County didn’t certify their results 5 seconds after the bolls closed, Hobbs threatened to have the Elections Board members arrested. Here are the details from the Daily Wire:
Democratic Arizona Secretary of State and Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs’ top deputy threatened the Mohave County Board of Supervisors with prosecution if it didn’t certify her election results before a Monday deadline, according to emails and documents reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The Secretary of State did contact our County and cited A.R.S. Section 16-1010 as a statute that could be used to prosecute [the board] if they did not certify the election,” said Matt Smith, the Mohave County Attorney, to the DCNF. The statute is an Arizona felony statute regarding election officials who “fail to perform their duties” under the law; as a Class 6 felony, upon conviction, it could result in up to two years’ imprisonment.
“The threat of legal action, including personally, came from the Arizona State Elections Director [Kori Lorick],” said the board’s chair-elect, Supervisor Travis Linginfelter. While previous reporting noted that the board’s members were warned of prosecution by their counsel, the board’s members have now stated that the threats came from Lorick, who reports to Hobbs, as well.
Do we detect a potential conflict of interest here? Before the election was held, Hobbs should have either resigned her seat or taken a leave of absence until the election process was concluded. In other words, no one should have been reporting to her at this time.
Hobbs was elected governor of Arizona on Nov. 8 to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, defeating the Republican candidate Kari Lake, who has now sought to contest the election results. Republicans also lost Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly defeated Republican investor Blake Masters to win a full six-year term.
A lot of the issues in the race, as I’ve mentioned previously, lead back to the flat out incompetence of Maricopa County’s election officials. Mohave County as well as several others had issues which led them to distrust the results. Since they were quick enough to anoint Hobbs as the new governor, “Her” people needed to make threats.
Lorick’s threat of prosecution was one of several efforts made by Hobbs’ team to force Mohave County to certify its election results before the Nov. 28 state deadline. Republican members of the board, like in other counties in the state, had sought to hold public hearings regarding the validity of voting machines used in their precincts, over concerns that they were not properly approved by the Secretary of State’s office.
We saw with Maricopa County that the machines flat out didn’t work. I am going to assume that other counties also experienced issues as well. It makes sense that they would want to make absolutely certain of their results. Of course, since the Democrats were winning, the last thing they want is to insure that the election results are valid if there is the slightest chance it would take the election away from them, hence the threats.
Lorick also sent a letter to the board warning that their voters could be “disenfranchised” if they did not certify by the deadline. The letter, obtained exclusively by the DCNF from Lingenfelter, states that the board “has a non-discretionary duty to canvass the returns of the election,” and that a failure to do so “will only serve to disenfranchise that county’s voters,” mirroring her warnings to other GOP-led counties that their votes “may be excluded” from the final tallies, thereby affecting results.
Spoken like a true Democrat. Do what I tell you or else.
Mohave County was one of several counties seeking more time to review election integrity issues, though it is the only county whose elected representatives are known to have been threatened with arrest. Cochise County, another GOP-led county in the state that has not certified its results, is currently the subject of a lawsuit by Hobbs’ office, though none of their members have reported criminal prosecution.
The Mohave County board eventually certified the results of the election on Monday, Nov. 28, before the deadline expired, though the threat of individual legal consequences for members may have altered their willingness to delay certification, like Cochise. During the video broadcast of the canvas meeting of the board, Supervisor and Chair Ron Gould mentioned that the actions were “under duress.”
Basically, you have someone who works for the apparent winner flat out threatening the election board with arrests if they didn’t toe the line. Considering everything that’s been going on for the last few election cycles, you would think that both the counties and the state would be walking on egg shells trying to confirm that everything was on the up and up. But then, the Democrat Party has a long history of stuffing ballot boxes and election fraud. Why should they change things now?
I do not know how this law works in Arizona and will let those who are knowledgeable about it comment below. What I do see is that the optics of this mess are really bad for Hobbs and the Secretary of State’s office. They could have worked with the counties to resolve any issues. Instead, they went all Nazi.
I don’t know what happens next, but I know that Kari Lake’s campaign has filed suit and I am assuming that a full audit and recount will be conducted. I also know that, at least in Maricopa County, there are documented cases of many people either being turned away at the polls or giving up in frustration after waiting in line for hours. I don’t see Hobb’s office talking about that, since it’s assumed most of the disenfranchised were Republicans. I guess now we wait and see.
Thatisall
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