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FILE – A man protests outside the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors auditorium prior to the board’s general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
FILE – A man gives the thumbs down to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors during their general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
FILE – A woman stands in protest with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors during their general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
Before November, election officials prepared for the possibility that Republicans who embraced former President Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud would challenge the verdict of voters by refusing to certify the results.
Three weeks after the end of voting, such challenges are playing out in just two states, Arizona and Pennsylvania, where Democrats won the marquee races for governor and U.S. Senate.
Legal experts predict the bids are doomed because local governmental bodies typically don’t have the option to vote against certifying the results of their elections. It also reflects the limited ability of election conspiracy theorists to disrupt the midterms. One rural Arizona county has drawn court challenges after its refusal to certify, but another flirting with blocking certification backed off amid legal threats.
In Pennsylvania, a handful of the state’s 67 counties have delayed certification because of recounts demanded by local conspiracy theorists in scattered precincts. But in most states, certification has gone smoothly.
“Before Election Day, I thought Republicans would exploit the certification process to undermine election results,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic attorney who has sued to compel the lone Arizona county to certify.
That there’s only one county delaying so far in that important battleground state, where Republican candidates who denied Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race ran unsuccessfully for governor and secretary of state, is “good news, and a bit of a surprise,” Elias said.
The outcome is a reflection of the diminished opportunities election conspiracy theorists have to control elections after a number of their candidates were routed in statewide elections for positions overseeing voting. They’re largely left with a growing footprint in conservative, rural counties. Still, that’s enough to cause headaches for having the election results certified on a statewide basis, raising concerns about how rural counties might respond after the next presidential election.
“It is one of the few places where election deniers have a lever of power,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of the local political bodies charged with certifying election results in most states. “It’s a good test run for 2024, showing state courts they’re going to have to step in.”
The movement that embraces Trump’s lies about voting hoped it would have many more levers after November. Candidates who backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election ran for top posts with power over state voting — including secretary of state, which in most states is the top election position — in five of the six swing states that were key to Trump’s 2020 loss. They lost every race in each of those states.
In 2020, Trump tried unsuccessfully to get Republican governors and secretaries of state to overrule their own voters and declare him the winner of some of the states won by Biden. With 2024 on the horizon, Trump now has fewer officials in his party to pressure if he becomes the nominee.
A Democrat, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, defeated Trump-backed Republican Kari Lake in the race for Arizona governor, flipping it out of the GOP category, and a Democrat also won the race to replace Hobbs. A Democrat defeated an election conspiracy theorist running for Nevada secretary of state, shifting another swing-state election office from the GOP.
On the local level, the picture is blurrier. There are more than 10,000 local election offices in the country that follow guidelines set by secretaries of state or other agencies that their states designate as the top election authorities. That’s where conspiracy theorists won at least some new offices and still have the power to disrupt proceedings.
During the June primary in New Mexico, rural Otero County refused to certify the results of its election, preventing the state from making the winners official until the state Supreme Court ordered it to act. That set a template that election lawyers feared would be vastly replicated in the weeks after the midterms. But this time even Otero certified its winners without complaint.
In Michigan, where a GOP slate of election conspiracy theorists was defeated in statewide races, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, Kristina Karamo, implored the state’s bipartisan board of canvassers not to certify the election during a hearing earlier this week. Karamo insisted there had been widespread fraud, even though she lost her race against Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson by more than 13 percentage points.
Tony Daunt, the Republican chair of the certification board, responded by blasting candidates who “feed into this nonsense” by making “claims that fire everybody up because it’s a short-term gain for them, and that’s dangerous to our system.” The board unanimously certified the election.
In Pennsylvania, the most prominent certification hiccup has come in Luzerne County, north of Philadelphia, which voted for Trump by 14 percentage points in 2020. County commissioners delayed certifying the election on Monday after one Democrat abstained from voting following an Election Day fiasco in which the election office ran out of ballots.
But the Democrat, Daniel Schramm, later told reporters he would vote to certify on Wednesday, after having time to confirm that the foul-up didn’t disenfranchise any voters. Certification is being delayed in a few other counties after local Republican committees and voters requested recounts.
In Arizona, the two Republicans on Cochise County’s three-member county commission blew past Monday’s certification deadline, saying they needed more information on the certification of vote tabulators, even though there have been no problems with voting or ballot counting in their county.
The secretary of state’s office has sued, saying that it must certify the state’s elections by Dec. 8. If Cochise, which voted for Trump in 2020 by nearly 20 percentage points, declines to include its conservative electorate in the total and a court doesn’t force it to, that would change the tally in one of the state’s congressional seats from being narrowly won by a Republican to narrowly being taken by a Democrat.
“The only legal effect this has is to disenfranchise all their voters,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation.
The efforts to delay certification are dangerous even if they’re doomed to fail, Becker and others said. They continue to sow discontent and distrust of voting and democracy.
David Levine, a former election official who is a fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, noted that conspiracy theories about elections have reached such a fever pitch in Arizona that Bill Gates, the Republican chair of the county commission in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. has been given additional security by the local sheriff.
“When you give legitimacy to baseless accusations about the election process, there is a concern that more of that will occur,” Levine said.
Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, certified its election results on Monday, after dozens of attendees demanded the board not do it. Some complained about printer malfunctions in the county, the state’s most populous, that led to confusion and long lines on Election Day — even though Maricopa officials said everyone had a chance to vote and that all legal ballots were counted.
In other counties, activists also spoke out against certification, though unsuccessfully. In Yavapai County, north of Phoenix, a woman who gave her name as Nancy Littlefield, wearing a hoodie patterned on the American flag, made clear that part of her objections were because she simply didn’t like the outcome of the election.
She urged Yavapai board members not to certify the vote because “I moved from California so I could be free and live my life and have my voice heard.”
Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan; Jonathan J. Cooper and Anita Snow in Phoenix; Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta; and Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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The Alaska state Senate will have a coalition of Democrats and Republicans serving as a majority caucus next January. Officials announced. Friday the coalition will include nine Democrats and eight Republicans, leaving three members of the 20-member chamber in the minority. Gary Stevens, a Republican from Kodiak, will serve as Senate president. Among other leadership positions include Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat, as Senate rules chair, and Cathy Giessel, an Anchorage Republican who previously served as the body’s president and regained her Senate seat in this year’s election, as majority leader.
A growing number of Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, are criticizing Donald Trump for dining with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
Despite officially earning what some might consider a relatively modest wage (compared to, for example, executives at S&P 500 companies), some members of Congress are estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
When President Joe Biden speaks about the “scourge” of gun violence, his go-to answer is to zero in on so-called assault weapons. America has heard it many times, including this week after shootings in Colorado and Virginia, that Biden wants to sign into law a ban on high-powered guns that have the capacity to kill many people very quickly. Such a move is still far off in a closely divided Congress. But Biden and the Democrats have become increasingly emboldened in pushing for stronger gun controls, and they’re doing so with no clear electoral consequences. The tough talk reflects steady progress that gun control advocates have made.
A senior Russian diplomat says Russia and the United States repeatedly came close to reaching agreement on a prisoner exchange and a deal remains possible before the year’s end. The Biden administration has been trying for months to negotiate the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner and another American jailed in Russia, Paul Whelan, Asked Tuesday whether a swap was possible before the end of the year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister responded that “there always is a chance.” He reiterated Moscow’s call for the U.S. to discuss the issue discreetly. Earlier this month, Griner began serving a nine-year sentence for drug possession at a penal colony about 350 kilometers (210 miles) east of Moscow.
The judge who presided over the trial of the man convicted of killing six people during the Waukesha Christmas parade is running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The race will determine the ideological balance of the court. By entering the race Tuesday, Waukesha County Circuit Judge Jennifer Dorow became the second conservative candidate declare their candidacy. Two liberal judges are also running. The winner will replace a retiring conservative justice who is part of a 4-3 majority. Liberals are prioritizing the race as a way to flip control of the court heading into the 2024 presidential election. Her husband Brian Dorow says Jennifer Dorow plans to hold an event launching her candidacy on Wednesday.
The Governor’s Council for Judicial Appointments has forwarded three names to Gov. Bill Lee to consider for a vacancy on the Court of Criminal Appeals. The Tennessee Supreme Court said in a statement last week that after a public hearing and interviews, the council selected Joshua B. Dougan, Matthew Joseph Wilson and William Mark Ward. Dougan is the assistant district attorney in the district that covers Chester, Henderson and Madison counties. Wilson is an assistant U.S. attorney. Ward is a retired criminal court judge in Shelby County. The vacancy in the court’s Western Section occurred when John Everett Williams died Sept. 2.
Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused Monday to certify the 2022 election despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by the state’s top election official.
The refusal to certify by Cochise County in southeastern Arizona comes amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races.
The extended Senate campaign in Georgia between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, football legend Herschel Walker, has grown increasingly bitter ahead as their Dec. 6 runoff nears. With Democrats already assured control of the Senate, it’s a striking contrast from two years ago, when the state’s twin Senate runoffs were mostly about which party would control the chamber in Washington. Warnock casts Walker as unqualified and unfit for office. Walker mocks Warnock as a hypocrite beholden to President Joe Biden. The broadsides reflect the candidates’ furious push in the four weeks between the Nov. 8 general election and runoff to persuade their supporters to cast another ballot.
A federal jury has weighed seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four associates for a second day without reaching a verdict in a high-stakes trial stemming from the U.S. Capitol attack. Jurors are expected to resume their deliberations Tuesday. Rhodes and his co-defendants are accused of a weekslong plot to stop the transfer of power from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. Prosecutors say the plot came to a head on Jan. 6, 2021, when Rhodes’ followers stormed the Capitol alongside hundreds of other angry Trump supporters.
FILE – A man protests outside the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors auditorium prior to the board’s general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
FILE – A man gives the thumbs down to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors during their general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
FILE – A woman stands in protest with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors during their general election canvass meeting, Nov. 28, 2022, in Phoenix. Worries that rogue county officials could undermine election results by refusing to certify them have lessened significantly in the wake of the midterms, with a lone Arizona county as the exception. Still, baseless attacks on the accuracy of the election by Republican county officials and angry members of the public already are raising concerns about for 2024, when local commissions will be asked to certify the results in a presidential race.
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