The Daily Agenda: The election is over!
Judges, it's time to get mean ... Wrong number, but let's chat ... And good legal representation is hard to find.
We survived this election season! Congratulations, everyone.
The good news is that the election is (about to be) officially canvassed and done with. The bad news is we’re gonna end our 30% off sale and put up that paywall that we’ve been threatening to put up for some time.
But not today. Today we’re gonna give you one more chance to subscribe at the sale price of just $84 for a full year. Take advantage of it now, or you’ll end up paying more later.
Arizona will officially declare the winners of the 2022 election today, when state leaders gather at an undisclosed location to sign the statewide election canvass in a formerly low-profile ceremony that will be livestreamed instead of open to the press this year due to security concerns.
Arizona’s election deniers did everything possible to stop this from happening, so let’s take a moment to celebrate the fact that they failed.
And for that, we largely have the courts to thank.
Since we last published, Arizona’s courts delivered a series of crushing blows to anti-elections crusaders’ attempts to undermine the 2022 election.
On Thursday, a Pima County Superior Court judge ordered the Cochise County Board of Supervisors to meet that day to approve the county’s canvass, ending the impasse intended to throw a wrench into state certification. (And as the local paper reminds everyone, there’s a process to recall supervisors if you don’t like them attempting to discount your vote.)
The courts also quickly dismissed a lawsuit from failed congressional candidate and election conspiracist Josh Barnett, who wanted the courts to nullify the results of the 2022 election due to “maladministration.” While Barnett’s attempt to represent himself in court was funny, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ultimately decided that his challenge, like the lawsuit from would-be Attorney General Abe Hamadeh, can’t be filed until after the state certifies the election.
But Kari Lake and Mark Finchem suffered the strongest legal rebuke for their lawsuit to bar the state from using any ballot tabulation machines in the 2022 election by claiming the machines were vulnerable to exploitation. The case was thrown out earlier this year, but lawyers for Maricopa County argued that the lawsuit was so uniquely full of nonsense that the court must not only award attorneys’ fees, but also send a legal rebuke against those who filed it. On Thursday, a federal judge agreed and, in a rare move, declared the claims so “frivolous,” “baseless” and “false and misleading” that sanctions were warranted against the attorneys, though the court stopped just short of saying the candidates deserved the same.
After today’s certification, the official window opens for lawsuits challenging the election. The courts will soon be inundated with lawsuits from those unwilling to accept the results of the election and, likely, more preposterous claims about how it was rigged.
Lake has been promising a lawsuit, complete with smoking-gun evidence from whistleblowers, though she’s having some trouble getting access to public records to support her claims. But the fact that she and her supporters are now clinging to public records battles and Elon Musk’s tweets about Twitter’s censorship of election deniers and Hunter Biden’s laptop show that the Lake campaign is simply planning another spectacle.
Is it time for the legal system to get serious about delivering consequences for those actively attempting to use the courts, or their elected positions, to overturn the will of voters and subvert democracy.
Sanctioning lawyers who bring frivolous lawsuits is a good start. As Federal Judge John Tuchi noted in his ruling imposing sanctions on Lake and Finchem’s legal team, claims made in court lead to threats outside of it.
“The court cannot ignore the dangers posed by making wide ranging allegations of vote manipulation in the current volatile political atmosphere,” Tuchi wrote.
Law enforcement officials should also take a serious look at requests from Hobbs, as well as former AG Terry Goddard and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, for potential criminal charges against the two supervisors who refused to certify their county’s election by last week’s deadline.
Rest in peace: Jim Kolbe, an 11-term U.S. representative for southern Arizona, died Saturday at age 80 following a stroke. Kolbe, who was the second openly gay Republican member of Congress after he came out in the mid-1990s, was often praised for focusing on his constituents instead of national politics, the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith writes. In recent years, the moderate Republican ended his registration with the GOP, instead going party-less and occasionally endorsing Democrats. Condolences and remembrances poured in from all political parties after Kolbe’s death was announced.
Time’s a-ticking: Lawmakers and school leaders are again calling on Gov. Doug Ducey to keep his word and call a special session to increase the school spending limit before January. At a press conference last Thursday, the bipartisan crew said the issue requires urgency, though Ducey has yet to make any moves toward a special session, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. A new batch of lawmakers — and a new set of potential obstructions — starts in January, though current lawmakers say they have the votes among their colleagues now to approve the increase.
Favorite story of the day: Ed Wignall, an 82-year-old man in Lake Havasu City, has mistakenly received thousands of calls from fans and foes of Kari Lake since the phone number for his at-home therapy practice was erroneously listed by Google as Lake’s campaign headquarters’ phone number, the Havasu News’ Joey Postiglione reports. At first, he was “pissed.” Then he tried to get the number removed. Then he just embraced it and started talking with voters who call, many of whom agree that their vote is sacred, regardless of their political views.
“I’m not going to stop,” Wignall said. “This is too much fun.”
A journalist that actually made money?: Congress is investigating improper uses of Paycheck Protection Program loans doled out during the pandemic, pointing to fintech companies for perpetuating fraud in the program. One of the alleged fraudsters was an Arizona-based company called Blueacorn PPP, which was run by a former journalist, one-time ABC15 anchor Stephanie Hockridge Reis and her husband, Nate Reis, the Republic’s Ryan Randazzo reports.
New friends in high places: As new leaders prepare to take their seats in January, staffing choices and committee appointments are coming out. In the Arizona House, incoming Speaker Ben Toma announced his choices, putting Rep. David Livingston in the all-powerful appropriations chair role. On the Senate side, President-elect Warren Petersen tapped John Kavanagh to lead appropriations, with Wendy Rogers chairing elections, Jake Hoffman chairing government and Anthony Kern chairing judiciary. Incoming Secretary of State Adrian Fontes selected Keely Varvel, who was chief deputy when Fontes was Maricopa County recorder, as his chief of staff.
The state of abortion: Court of Appeals judges in southern Arizona last week heard arguments in the ongoing case over Arizona’s abortion bans and which will law will govern the land following Roe’s fall, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. Meanwhile, one Republican lawmaker, Rep. Lupe Diaz, wrote an op-ed for the Green Valley News where he says he would not vote to lift the outright abortion ban if Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs calls a special session on the issue.
Cleanups or civil rights: The American Civil Liberties Union sued Phoenix last week over controversial cleanups at the homeless encampment in central Phoenix, saying the sweeps violate people’s civil rights. The suit also says other city codes violate the law by essentially criminalizing homelessness, the Phoenix New Times’ Katya Schwenk reports. The cleanups have been on hold since January after the practice became part of an investigation from the Justice Department, but the city plans to restart them.
Read his lips: Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway said he will arrest anyone who puts shipping containers in his county for illegal dumping, taking a stand against the Ducey administration’s destructive, possibly illegal practice of making containers into a makeshift border fence, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports. The containers haven’t yet entered Santa Cruz County, but have been under construction not far from the county line.
At least show up: Despite constant rhetoric over auditing practices, some counties still don’t get participation from political parties in required hand count audits after elections, making it so they can’t conduct them. The Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small reports that three counties weren’t able to do their hand counts after the general election, though the 12 that conducted the hand counts did not find any problems.
Keep an eye on school boards: Twenty candidates endorsed by Purple for Parents, a group that arose in opposition to the Red for Ed teacher pay movement, won their school board races, the Mesa Tribune’s Ken Sain reports. The group has actively opposed school policies on COVID-19, teaching on race and equity and inclusion policies for LGBTQ students.
Unjust: Conservative columnist George Will highlights a civil asset forfeiture case in Arizona for the Washington Post. Jerry Johnson flew to Arizona with enough cash to bid on a semi-truck to expand his business, only to be “involuntarily enrolled in a Kafkaesque tutorial” for several years that has so far not gotten him his money back.
Worth a listen: Latino USA released an audio investigation into how Border Patrol policies created a “death funnel” in the borderlands, including in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, where thousands of migrants have died trying to cross into the U.S.
Quite a consolation prize: Nathaniel Ross, an Arizona State University student who ran for Mesa City Council, didn’t win a seat on the government body this year, but did get named a Rhodes Scholar, a prestigious program to study at Oxford in the U.K. awarded to just 32 Americans this year, the Mesa Tribune reports.
New Substack just dropped: Republic investigative reporter Joseph Darius Jaafari launched a new publication called LOOKOUT, a newsletter and quarterly print magazine which will focus on the LGBTQ+ community in the Phoenix area. Check out his introductory post here, and be sure to subsribe to read the reporting.
There have been so many wild twists and turns in Cochise County that you really just have to laugh at it sometimes.
A lawyer was chosen last-minute to represent the board in court, then didn’t show up, but did file a request just before the judge issued a ruling, asking that the hearing be moved from a county court to a federal court named the “United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arizona.” Astute court-watchers will note that there is no such court: Arizona has just one federal judicial district, the United States District Court for the District of Arizona.
Hard to believe that I'm in America when I read a paragraph like this one. Iraq, maybe. Afghanistan, maybe. Sickening that in America an event is secret and closed to the press for "security concerns."
Arizona will officially declare the winners of the 2022 election today, when state leaders gather at an undisclosed location to sign the statewide election canvass in a formerly low-profile ceremony that will be livestreamed instead of open to the press this year due to security concerns.
Wendy Rogers chairing the Elections Committee? That should be fun.