“Officials in rural Cochise County, Arizona, on Thursday certified the results of the county’s midterm elections” after a judge ordered them to, CNN reported on Thursday, December 1, 2022 (read story here).
Cochise County missed the Monday deadline because the two Republicans on the 3-person board of supervisors refused to certify the election in a spat over voting machines.
The secretary of state, Governor-elect Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, sued them. Under Arizona law, certification is mandatory, not a choice. Hobbs earlier said if they didn’t certify by Friday, December 2, the county’s 47,284 ballots wouldn’t count. That would’ve given a U.S. House seat won by a GOP candidate to the Democrats (see story here). It also would’ve flipped the state schools superintendent outcome from Republican to Democrat.
Hobbs said the voting machines were tested and certified. There’s a paper trail to prove it, but that wasn’t good enough for these election deniers. They chose to believe a baseless conspiracy theory instead. They were biting off their nose to spite their face. Their own nose, their own face.
To the bitter end, it was like pulling teeth. Only one of the holdouts showed up to join the Democratic supervisor in voting to certify. The other was nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, rogue county clerk Tina Peters’ deputy has taken a plea deal and will testify against her indicted boss, see story here.
Moral #1: Believing something that isn’t true doesn’t make it true, nor does it excuse you from carrying out legal duties, or give you a free pass to break the law.
Moral #2: Rule of law, and the willingness of conservative and liberal judges to enforce the law, is what saved our democracy and once again is keeping nutcases from taking over our country and inflicting a Trumpian dictatorship on us.