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Peggy Judd listened with interest in late November as Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borrelli urged county supervisors in an area he represents to hand-count ballots in the 2024 elections instead of using machines.

The Mohave County supervisors had been warned that doing so would be illegal. But Borrelli promised them that if they went ahead, “private individuals” would pay for a lawyer to represent them.

“The funding is already in place,” he said, declining to identify the private individuals.

Mohave supervisors nonetheless voted against hand-counting — but Judd, 61, a supervisor in southeast Arizona’s Cochise County, wondered if the offer of free legal help applied to her.

She could use it.

A year earlier, Judd and fellow Cochise Supervisor Tom Crosby had voted to expand their county’s hand-count audit of the 2022 midterm election ballots, and also to delay certification. The two Republicans have since been indicted by a state grand jury for alleged conspiracy and interference with an election officer, both felonies. According to recently filed court documents, prosecutors believe that in voting to expand the hand count, Crosby and Judd were attempting to delay or prevent the canvass.

Both officials deny the charge. A judge will hear oral arguments in the case on April 19.

Judd now says she was used by people who never intended to support her. Her experience could resonate with public officials around the country facing similar choices, and hearing similar promises about anonymous donors willing to pay legal expenses.

“I really need funding to help me in this case,” Judd said, but none has come from people like Borrelli who are pushing hand counts around the state.

“I’m pissed,” she said.

Judd has said little since the indictment. But in a recent interview with Votebeat, she said that after she was indicted, she got a call from her good friend Mohave County Supervisor Hildy Angius, offering help. Angius told her she had asked Borrelli to help as well.

Angius’ message to Borrelli, according to Judd, was: “Peggy needs your money. This is your chance to prove that you have unlimited amounts of money.”

Reached by phone this week, Angius said she couldn’t recall whether she spoke with Borrelli about Judd. She did say that she asked “everyone” to help Judd out, and that she herself gave Judd money for her legal defense.

Borrelli did not respond to two messages asking if he had offered Judd legal or financial support for her case.

“They don’t intend to help me,” Judd said, talking about Borrelli and the purported anonymous donor who had promised money to the Mohave supervisors.

“They think I am small beans,” she said. “I guess I am.”

In a later interview, she said she isn’t mad at Borrelli. But she is mad at people such as Mike Lindell, a prominent figure in the push to hand-count ballots, who often asks supporters for money to pay for these kinds of endeavors. She subscribes to Lindell’s emails, she said, and “it’s bitter to see him collecting every day for what I’m going through.”

Judd has raised about $3,500 toward her legal bills through an online fundraiser, and said her largest donations have been $500 or less. Angius is one of her top donors on the online fundraiser. She gave her $500 and wrote on the fundraising page: “This is about election integrity and State intimidation of local elected officials. This has got to stop now. Good luck Supervisor Judd.”

Judd also said that her role in the 2022 midterm election drama has been mischaracterized. She says she didn’t personally think there was a problem with the machines that counted the county’s ballots, and the only reason she voted to expand the county’s hand-count audit was that it was what her constituents wanted.

“I never pushed for it,” she said. “You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it.”

Judd said in 2022 that her vote with the supervisors to hand count all ballots after the machine count was meant to give everyone confidence and faith in the county’s elections. The hand count, she said, would provide “proof of good, positive, look our election system is great.”

“It was just to show them we have good machines. We have a good elections director. We have a good system here. You don’t have to be worried about Cochise County.”

With her trial approaching, Judd said she will be OK if she has to go to jail.

When the grand jury indictments came out, Judd’s husband was ill, and she said her main concern then was who was going to care for him. But he recently died.

“I will be sad, and upset,” she said, “but my husband won’t suffer because of it.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was co-published in partnership with The Guardian.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

TEMPE, Ariz. — At the local discount cinema in this Phoenix suburb this winter, a crowd of about 100 took their seats for something different from the typical Sunday matinee.

The man standing in front of the big screen, Mark Cook, packed up his life months ago to drive around in an RV for a mission he said he was called to by God. Their elections had been stolen from them, he told the crowd, and it was time to take them back. He dubbed his cross-country venture the “hand count road show.”

“Elections belong to us,” he said, emphatically. “Say it!” a woman in the front of the theater yelled out.

The ultimate solution he offered the crowd: Eliminating mail-in voting, counting all ballots cast at polling places on the night of the election, and, most importantly, doing the counting by hand.

Cook is one of several quasi-disciples of Mike Lindell and other big-name election influencers who have been spreading the hand-count gospel around the country since 2020, when Donald Trump began claiming without evidence that ballot tabulating machines were rigged against him.

The push to hand-count ballots is ramping up, albeit with spotty success, as the 2024 election nears, according to a review by The Guardian and Votebeat. If more localities decide to try hand-counting in the November election, results could be inaccurate, untrustworthy, or delayed, fostering more distrust in elections. In places that opt not to hand count, supporters of the practice could use this choice as a reason to question or refuse to sign off on certification.

Either way, it raises the risk of throwing the 2024 election into chaos.

“It just gives additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” said Heather Sawyer, executive director at American Oversight. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”

The push hasn’t gained much ground in the large swing counties where Trump claimed votes were stolen from him. It’s been more effective in small or rural counties that voted heavily for Trump, where conservative activists have lined up at public meetings to repeat the conspiracies of Cook, Lindell, and others. There — in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — local officials voted to give hand-counting ballots a try in either their midterm or presidential primary elections.

These attempts have proven what election experts have long understood: Ditching machines and exclusively hand-counting ballots is time-consuming, expensive, and more prone to human error. It’s also unnecessary. Election officials routinely verify that machines are counting votes properly by hand-counting the results on a portion of ballots after each election.

Most recently, in Gillespie County, Texas, errors were discovered in nearly all precincts after the county tried to hand-count its Republican presidential primary election.

Nevertheless, Gillespie County still plans to hand-count its local runoff election in May. In South Dakota, there are efforts to get hand-counting through local initiatives. And in New Hampshire, one town voted to count ballots by hand after a concerted push by local activists.

This seemingly grassroots effort has sometimes been backed by outside funding and promises of financial support, some from Lindell and others from unknown sources, according to public records and statements reviewed by The Guardian and Votebeat.

Before a California county voted to get rid of its tabulation machines, Lindell wrote to a supervisor that if they “have any pushback, including lawsuits against you or your county, I will provide all of the resources necessary (including both financial and legal) for this fight,” according to documents obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group that has tracked the hand count movement across the country, and shared with The Guardian and Votebeat.

Lindell told The Guardian he has contributed money to efforts in South Dakota and New Hampshire, but he wasn’t sure how much or how exactly the funds were used. He also features hand-count activists on his online video programs and helps them find donations that way. “Any way I can to get the word out,” he said.

Money wouldn’t come from him personally, but from an affiliated fundraising outfit, the Lindell Offense Fund, he said. His personal financial issues, stemming from lawsuits he faces, are well documented: He couldn’t pay his lawyers in defamation cases brought by voting machine companies.

“I don’t have money to stick in there myself. I’m reaching out to the public. … I’m not a grifter. I’d be the worst grifter that ever lived,” he said.

In Arizona, the push to hand-count ballots has mysterious benefactors, with an unknown source offering money for the legal defense of county supervisors who take on the fight to hand-count ballots, defying state law. Most recently, an elected official in rural Mohave County sued the attorney general, an effort to obtain a court ruling saying that hand-counting ballots is legal. The supervisor, Ron Gould, said in an interview he doesn’t “have permission” to disclose who is paying his legal costs — but so far, it isn’t him.

Mike Lindell influences hand-count push

Inside Pollack Cinemas in Tempe, road show attendees munched on popcorn and sipped sodas as Cook told them about a story he heard from a Texas poll worker. The poll worker told him they watched as a ballot counter on a tabulation machine ticked up one by one, but no one was inserting ballots at the time.

Many in the crowd gasped. “Oh my gosh,” one said.

This claim could have been referencing a viral video which showed an electronic pollbook in Dallas County adding voters after polls closed, which county officials have explained was simply a delay in the system.

Like many who promote hand-counting ballots, Cook subscribes to wide-ranging conspiracy theories about voting, and he told the crowd all about them. Their election officials in Maricopa County, he told them without offering proof, had caused problems during the midterm election so they could “pepper in ballots.” Election officials across the country used messy voter rolls to “inject” “phantom” voters, he said, again without evidence. And COVID-19 was born as a way to increase vote-by-mail across the country, he said falsely, just so the 2020 election could be stolen from Donald Trump.

The solutions he offers are familiar talking points among the Republican leaders who promote hand-counting ballots. They would restrict voting access, such as ending all early and mail-in voting, and purging voter rolls.

Cook credits Lindell with influencing his beliefs. He attended Lindell’s infamous “cyber symposium” in 2021, where Lindell said the “seeds were planted” for people to go back to their states to advocate against machines.

With Lindell’s assistance and coordination, the hand-count pushes have become more systematic.

He tried to rally the troops at a summit in Missouri last August, where he detailed “The Plan,” his step-by-step guide for grassroots groups and activists to convince their local elected officials to ditch machines. He advises them to talk about machine vulnerabilities, voter roll issues, internet connections, and other frequent talking points of the far-right election activist movement. Then, “call for the implementation of hand counts” and prepare to respond to objections.

Cause of America, one of several organizations affiliated with Lindell, says it has “over 300,000 volunteers on the ground going county by county to change laws, remove machines, teach hand count voting and more.” Lindell said he hosts a weekly call with activists across the country to talk about the plan.

Lindell held the 2021 cyber symposium in South Dakota, where activists are now working on gathering petition signatures to put the idea of getting rid of voting machines before voters in two dozen counties. Proponents have so far convinced two counties, Fall River and Gregory, to adopt full hand counts.

Some counties have objected to the petitions, saying the change could violate state and federal law.

“If the voters vote for this ordinance, we will have lawsuits,” McPherson County Auditor Lindley Howard told South Dakota News Watch. “If we illegally deny the petition, then the petitioners will file a lawsuit. I feel like counties were left swimming in an ocean without a lifejacket.”

In New Hampshire, a group used many towns’ “warrant articles” process to try to get rid of machines, filing petitions in nearly two dozen towns to call for a vote on machine tabulation. Activists in the state tried a similar push in 2022, but didn’t get much traction.

Lindell and New Hampshire organizers hoped for a landslide of towns moving to hand counts.

“Imagine the impact for the rest of the state.... Imagine the impact on the rest of our country! God willing, this will be our generation’s ‘shot heard around the world,’” a crowdfunding site for the New Hampshire push says. The crowdfunding page notes that Lindell funded a “digital mobile truck” to advertise for the campaign for six days at $20,000.

But so far just one town, Danville, has approved the petition to hand-count ballots in presidential elections. The town’s attorney told the Associated Press he doesn’t believe the change will stand because it may violate state law.

New Hampshire organizers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lindell has featured both the South Dakota and New Hampshire efforts on his online show.

‘No upside’ to hand-counting ballots

There’s a side benefit to the hand count fervor for the broader rightwing election movement: It serves to keep local activists engaged in the leadup to the 2024 election, notes Emma Steiner, who has followed the hand count push for Common Cause.

“It’s basically an objective that they can organize around, that they can lobby their local legislators and officials about, and something that keeps them motivated and their eye on the ball so that they will be available in the game for November,” Steiner said.

In Arizona, far-right lawmakers Sonny Borrelli and Wendy Rogers have traveled the state to spread the word about hand counts. The anti-machine sentiment is still running strong in the swing state, which could decide the 2024 election.

Before Borrelli and Rogers’ tour, Cochise County notably attempted to move to a full hand count, despite a warning from the secretary of state at the time that the move would be illegal. An unnamed source paid a $10,000 legal retainer for two Republican supervisors who had voted for the hand count to happen, according to their statements at public meetings.

Those two supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, then later refused to certify the election, which required court intervention. Crosby and Judd were recently charged by the state for their role in delaying certification.

Judd said in an interview that she wanted to hand count ballots only to appease the crowds that had been showing up to board meetings.

“It was just to show them we have good machines, we have a good elections director, we have a good system here, you don’t have to be worried about Cochise county,” she said.

Judd said she didn’t know who paid the $10,000 legal retainer for the related case.

When asked if he paid the Cochise retainer, Lindell said, “I don’t believe so.”

In Cochise and elsewhere, the hand count push has driven out some elections officials, who have found themselves at odds with their county boards over the practice. Cochise’s seasoned elections director, Lisa Marra, left her job after suing the county for harassment. She eventually received a $130,000 settlement.

When Mohave County, a heavily Republican part of the state, was considering a full hand count of ballots cast in 2024 elections, Borrelli told the local supervisors that unnamed hand count supporters had promised him they’d financially support the county if there was any legal pushback.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, sent a letter warning the supervisors they could be prosecuted for hand-counting all ballots, and the supervisors voted not to move forward. That spurred Gould’s lawsuit against Mayes, asking the court to rule on whether hand counting is legal in the state. In the suit, Gould says that he faced “potentially losing his liberty and being jailed as a criminal, if Defendant Mayes is correct, for voting according to his conscience.”

Gould said in an interview that he sued so that the state would “stop threatening him.” He believes hand counting ballots is legal and would improve voter confidence.

Supervisor Buster Johnson voted “no” to stop the switch to hand counting. Borrelli is now challenging Johnson for his seat on the board in the July primary election, which could change the makeup of the board. Borrelli said in a text message that his run for the seat has “nothing to do with elections.”

In a phone interview, Johnson said he voted no on hand counting because, along with the legal reasons, he said, it would be expensive and error-prone, and it attempts to fix a non-existent problem.

“There is no upside to it.”

Borrelli didn’t respond to a question about the identity of the unnamed supporter who had promised to pay legal costs in Mohave County. Judd said that Borrelli has not offered to pay legal costs for her pending criminal case.

Beyond Arizona, places that recently tried hand counting have found out the hard way about its challenges.

Osage County, a small Missouri county outside Jefferson City, hand-counted a local election in April 2023 as a test of the practice, spurred by activists who convinced the county clerk to try it. Lindell and other activists now cite the Osage count as one of their successes.

But, County Clerk Nicci Kammerich wrote in a local newspaper, the process took longer and cost more in the end, even with a group of mostly volunteers who helped hand count.

Kammerich sent the article to The Guardian after an interview request, saying the hand count issue has consumed her office: “I do not have the time to talk. I get calls and email requests on the daily about this hand count and it has been really interfering with my day to day tasks.”

After the hand count, Kammerich heard from election judges who said they wouldn’t work again if they had to hand count.

“After considering all factors of this election and comparing it to other elections that are similar, I fear that if we were to continue hand counting it would cost us more in time, money, losing volunteers, and accuracy of votes,” Kammerich wrote, adding that her office intends to go back to tabulation machines for future elections.

How the U.S. counts votes

Most of the U.S. votes on paper ballots, which then are fed into machines that tabulate the results. Some places use touch screens, where people vote by selecting options on a screen and then cast printed receipts of their votes into machines. Machine-tabulated results are then verified with a hand count of a small percentage of ballots, with only tight races receiving a full hand recount. Some jurisdictions, typically very small, still hand count paper ballots, though these instances are rare.

The widespread use of machines is relatively recent: the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, allowed many smaller areas to afford tabulation machines, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of the proponents of hand counting may remember when their local elections were counted by hand.

Proponents of the practice often point to other countries, like France, where hand-counting paper ballots is the norm. But local ballots in the U.S. are often much longer and more complex than those in European countries: Americans vote on far more offices, and elections are frequently consolidated, so a voter will weigh in on federal, state, and local elected officials and ballot questions at the same time. Some of these countries don’t use mail-in voting, a more common voting method in the U.S., and they are smaller than the U.S.

“A voter in San Francisco in the presidential election is going to vote on more things in that one election than a citizen of Great Britain will vote on in a lifetime,” Stewart said.

Moving to hand counts brings not only financial and accuracy questions, but also logistical ones: it takes far more people and space than machine counting. In some counties that discussed the idea of hand counts, finding a place to house a big operation to count ballots presented obstacles.

Cook shrugs off these points. If we found a way to do it in years past, he said, we can do it now.

Lindell’s response to the pushback from elections officials: “They’re all wrong. They’re all wrong. … These election officials, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They absolutely don’t. They’re just putting it out there and you media people put it out there as gospel. It’s not true.”

Proponents of hand counting say it’s one way to restore faith in elections, especially among those who don’t trust the results. But whenever people claim an election reform will restore confidence in the process, the evidence typically shows it doesn’t, Stewart, of MIT, said.

“I don’t see any evidence that something like this would be the silver bullet that would restore confidence among the mass public,” Stewart said.

Correction: This story originally misstated who warned Cochise County officials in 2022 that their hand count plan would be illegal. It was the Arizona secretary of state, not the attorney general.

Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras contributed to this report.

Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter at The Guardian. Contact Rachel at rachel.leingang@theguardian.com. Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

The two Cochise County supervisors who face felony charges for allegedly attempting to interfere with the certification of the county’s midterm election recently filed documents in court that give glimpses of the secret grand jury interviews that led to their indictment.

The filings by Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, the board’s two Republicans, reveal how state prosecutors attempted to connect the supervisors’ ploy to expand the county’s hand-count audit of its election results to an alleged conspiracy to delay or prevent the county’s elections results from being certified.

The documents quote grand jury interviews in depth, providing a view into proceedings that, under state law, must be kept private. The filings were originally public records, but are now not available publicly after the state requested they be sealed. Votebeat obtained them from local independent journalist David Morgan, who got them before they were sealed.

Crosby answered the grand jury’s questions in detail, while Judd invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and did not answer a single question, according to the documents.

Crosby also blamed Democratic Supervisor Ann English, who was at the time the chairman of the board, for the board’s failure to vote on the county’s Nov. 28, 2022, deadline to canvass, or certify, the election, stating that she didn’t put the correct agenda item on the agenda. “I didn’t delay,” Crosby told the jurors, according to his court filing, “Ann English caused the delay… She misagendized what was supposed to happen on the 28th.”

Meeting minutes show that the agenda item was to certify the election, as it was 10 days prior, too, when Crosby and Judd first voted to delay the vote. But the item did not include what Crosby had requested. Prior to the vote, Crosby wanted the supervisors to hear a formal debate between the Secretary of State’s Office and “experts” on voting machines. English said in an interview Thursday that, as chairman, she didn’t create meeting agendas — the board clerk does.

Hearing from Votebeat that these two filings, which provide short snippets of a 293-page grand jury transcript, were already circulating in the public, a spokesperson for Attorney General Kris Mayes said Thursday that the office is now going to request that the entire transcript of the grand jury proceedings be made public. Mayes, a Democrat, launched the initial investigation that led to the supervisors’ indictments.

Request for case to be remanded back to grand jury

The grand jury indicted Crosby and Judd in November for one charge of conspiracy and one charge of interference of an election officer, alleging they conspired to delay the canvass of votes cast and knowingly interfered with the Arizona Secretary of State’s ability to complete the statewide canvass. Both pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in December. A trial is scheduled for May 16.

Crosby’s motion to dismiss the case filed earlier this month, which Judd joined, presents their main defense: They believe state law provides them legislative immunity from prosecution for the conversations they have and their votes during supervisors’ meetings, because they act as the county’s legislative body. Legislative immunity was intended to apply to state lawmakers, and historically has, but Crosby and Judd say it applies to county officials, too.

They also deny any illegal actions, claiming that their duty to certify the election results are discretionary. “There is no unlawful act let alone any conspiracy by Supervisors voting their conscience,” Crosby said in the document.

But if the judge decides not to dismiss the case, Crosby and Judd in the recent documents ask the judge to instead remand the case back to the grand jury because they say they weren’t given fair proceedings.

Witnesses called before the grand jury during a two-day proceeding in November included Crosby, Judd, a special agent from the Attorney General’s Office, and County Attorney Brian McIntyre, according to Judd’s filing. The transcript of the proceedings are 293 pages, according to Judd’s filing, and not public — at least for now.

The supervisors believe the state should have informed grand jurors of what they believe to be the supervisors’ legislative immunity and should have better informed the jury about the law on supervisors’ role in certifying the election. Judd also says that the state didn’t properly inform the grand jurors of her Fifth Amendment rights.

Their other main complaint is with McIntyre’s testimony, which they felt was opinionated and shouldn’t be taken as evidence. McIntyre, a Republican, advised the supervisors in November 2022 not to expand the hand-count audit and to certify the election on time.

During grand jury proceedings, Crosby said, the state allowed “misleading testimony regarding the character and aim of the hand count, infra, to further its baseless conspiracy theory that the hand count was pursued to intentionally interfere with the Secretary of State’s duty to canvass the election.”

Crosby alleges that McIntyre gave testimony to the grand jury that was full of “his baseless opinions on the law in his effort to smear his own client.”

McIntyre did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, said the office declined to comment on the documents.

From hand counting to certification

The state prosecutors and grand jurors asked the witnesses many questions about how the effort to expand the county’s post-election hand-count audit of ballots unfolded.

Cochise County supervisors were among the many across the state that faced pressure from GOP leaders and activists to conduct a full hand count of ballots, claiming without evidence that ballot tabulation machines were not accurate or properly accredited.

A judge ruled the day before the election, on Nov. 7, that the supervisors and recorder couldn’t perform a hand count of all ballots cast, since the post-election audit under state law only includes a portion of ballots. But the supervisors still wanted to expand the hand count, and took steps to prepare, even after the judge’s decision.

On Nov. 14, without voting publicly to do so, Crosby and Judd sued Elections Director Lisa Marra for blocking the expanded hand count. Residents filed open meeting law complaints to the Attorney General’s Office, saying that decision should have been made in a public vote.

Expanding the hand-count audit at this point, when the elections director was attempting to prepare for an expected statewide recount and with the supervisors’ deadline for certifying the election two weeks away, might have made it difficult for the county to certify on time.

Crosby implied that the supervisors’ hand-count decisions were what brought the grand jury to its conspiracy charge. He said in his filing the state used its witnesses to present to the grand jury “a truly ridiculous (and itself misleading) ‘conspiracy’ theory that the efforts to conduct an expanded hand count constituted a conspiracy to interfere with the Secretary of State’s duty to canvass the statewide election merely because of how long an expanded hand count might theoretically take.”

Crosby revealed new details about that time period in his filing, claiming that he and Judd had both decided independently, without speaking to each other, to consult the attorney the board chose to represent them, Bryan Blehm, during the same time period and both independently agreed to file the lawsuit against Marra.

He wrote that he was “relying on [his attorney Bryan] Blehm’s obligation to advise the board of any possible illegalities.” Blehm is a former family law attorney whose work in election law began the year prior to the midterm, in 2021, when he represented the Cyber Ninjas in the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots.

Crosby and Judd withdrew the lawsuit against Marra two days after filing it, on Nov. 16.

They then voted on Nov. 18 to delay the certification, also called a canvass, of the county’s election results, until Nov. 28. At the time, Judd stated that she wanted the hand count of 100% of ballots to back up the election results, and Crosby voted to delay the vote until the tabulation machines’ accreditation was “confirmed by persons with expertise in that field.”

After the supervisors’ second refusal to certify the canvass again on Nov. 28, the Secretary of State’s Office sued, and on Dec. 1 a court forced the supervisors to certify, prior to the Secretary of State’s deadline to certify statewide results. But Crosby didn’t show on Dec. 1, leaving Judd and English to cast the deciding “yes” votes to certify.

The recent filings do not provide the full picture of grand jury interviews.

With the release of these documents publicly, Taylor with the Attorney General’s Office said the office believes “this means the entire grand jury transcript should be released and we are going to work towards that.”

Taylor said he didn’t have an immediate timeline for when that would happen.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Sierra Vista — At the base of the Huachuca Mountains near the Mexican border, in a city built next to an Army base, crowds gathered to look at the machines that some of them believe have been stealing their votes.

Chris Wlaschin, the security lead for the machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software, brought the equipment to this city to try and convince them otherwise. Attempting to connect with the veteran-heavy audience, he told them he, too, was a veteran, and described himself as a patriot.

“I have too much to risk,” Wlaschin told them, “by coming up here and not telling you the truth.”

But the rumblings in the room suggested not everyone believed him.

As he laid out how his company tries to ensure accurate and secure voting, some attendees were shaking their heads or whispering to neighbors. “We have to be able to trust that our votes are being counted,” said one attendee, Danny Bergene, who wore a black shirt reading “HELL NO, JOE” with a rifle pictured on it. “And,” he continued, “no one trusts the machines.”

More than a year after the midterm election and a commotion that drew national attention, distrust continues unabated in conservative Cochise County. It was here that GOP claims of a stolen gubernatorial election prompted Republican supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd to try to hand-count all ballots and block the certification of the county’s votes. Now, Crosby and Judd face pending felony charges after a state grand jury found they conspired and interfered with an election.

County officials are trying to educate the public on how elections are run, hoping to rebuild trust. The Democratic Party is running candidates for all three supervisor spots in what they say is an effort to regain “responsible county government.” And Judd said in an interview she’s changed her mind about how much influence she, as a supervisor, can have on election matters.

“It’s a state matter,” she said. “I’ve settled on that.”

Bringing about change is difficult in a county so influenced by outside voices. Many seem to have made up their mind about the fairness of elections, or are more worried about other problems: Their roads need work. Their water resources are diminishing. And border crossings by undocumented immigrants are more than double this year than last, overwhelming local resources in the communities nearest the border.

Theresa Walsh, a Democrat challenging Crosby in the upcoming election, said these are the issues people want to talk about when she’s campaigning.

“I was going around and talking to people, and they were like, Who is Tom Crosby?’” Walsh said. “What is a supervisor?”

How election misinformation came to Cochise

Cochise County, in the southeast corner of Arizona hours away from Phoenix, is larger in square miles than the state of Connecticut but has just 125,000 residents. More than half live away from the population center of Sierra Vista, in small cities and towns that pepper the rugged desert and mountainous landscape. Getting to those towns means heading off the main highway, sometimes for an hour or more.

Long before Wlaschin came to town, Cochise County residents began listening to other sources who were telling them elections were rigged, and it was the voting machines that made that possible.

At first, it was former President Donald Trump and his unproven claims of vote switching in the 2020 election. Then came gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, whose unproven claims of fraud and wrongdoing in Maricopa County’s midterm election resonated with many voters here, where contempt for the state’s most populous county can run high.

“All the sudden, there was this vroom,” said Sierra Vista resident Bob Karp, gesturing with his hands to suggest an explosion.

Crowds showed up to county supervisors meetings in 2022 and pressured them not to certify the election. After two delays, a court forced supervisors to vote yes.

Longtime elections director Lisa Marra, well respected by her peers across the state, soon left, citing pressure and harassment after supervisors attempted to force her to illegally hand-count all ballots during the post-election audit. The county gave election duties to County Recorder David Stevens, a Republican who has expressed doubts about election security and was entangled in the hand-count push. Stevens then hired a new elections director who had spread unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020, but he resigned months later after facing intense criticism.

The county manager then called on Tim Mattix, the city clerk who had recently retired, to come back and take the job. He did, though he’s since laid low.

At the meetings last week, he stayed in the back. These voting machine demonstrations were partly his idea, but he didn’t speak at them. When it was time to introduce notable people in the room, the county manager introduced Stevens and others, but not Mattix.

After a demonstration of the machines, attendees asked several questions about how people vote in-person in the county. While the vast majority of Arizona counties use hand-marked paper ballots at polling places, in Cochise County, voters make their choices on a touch-screen machine. Those machines print out a ballot so the voter can review their selections before casting the ballot into a separate machine.

Attendees were suspicious of the barcodes on those ballots, which are encoded with the voter selections for the tabulation machines to read. They also asked several questions about why the voter check-in system has a secure wi-fi connection, and about how data is encrypted. Throughout the discussion, Wlaschin seemed keen on convincing the crowd that he, himself, could be trusted.

“If I thought for a minute that ES&S was doing something wrong in terms of security, I would call the attorney general myself,” he said at one point.Tricia Gerrodette of Sierra Vista said it was nice to hear about the security features on the machines. She likes that voters can review a printed ballot that shows their selections.

County spokesperson Jane Montgomery said the county received positive feedback from people who said they hadn’t fully understood the layers of security the systems include. But she also said county officials recognize “there continue to be differing opinions” about the use of machines to count votes.

Election issues amid other local concerns, politics

Part of the problem is reaching voters at all.

The next day, in Tombstone, a tourist town about a 30-minute drive from Sierra Vista down a two-lane highway, Robert Scott, manager of the Trump Store, said he hadn’t heard about the meetings in the first place. Even if he had, he may not have gone. He’s busy working two jobs — running the store and as a janitor elsewhere.

He is convinced that Trump’s claims of vote switching are true and that Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs fixed the 2020 and 2022 elections in Arizona, he said, despite the court challenges presenting these claims being dismissed.

He lives in Tombstone, he said, but he doesn’t pay much attention to local politics and didn’t know Crosby and Judd had been indicted.

“That seems ridiculous,” he said.

But his main local concern, he said, is “that road between St. David and Benson.”

“This bridge out there is down to one lane,” he said. “It’s been that way for over a year. They haven’t done any work on it for months.”

When Walsh talks to voters, she said, they bring up water conservation, border security, and taxes. If they do mention elections, they ask how much the lawsuits related to the midterm election are costing county taxpayers. Judges ordered the county to pay $89,000 in attorney fees and legal costs to the parties that filed the lawsuit to stop the full hand-count, for example, and $36,000 for the case regarding the supervisors’ refusal to certify the election.

The Democratic Party — which only makes up about 24% of the voting population here — is supporting candidates for all three county supervisor positions for the first time in more than a decade. They are hoping Walsh, a retired Army colonel, can oust Crosby in a district with 19% registered Democrats, and that they can hold onto the seat currently held by Democrat Ann English, who is not running for re-election in her district, which is about 34% Democratic. Judd is also not running again. They are also hopeful about the Democratic candidate challenging Stevens in the recorder race, Anne Carl.

Karp, who is managing Walsh’s campaign, said that if Walsh and Carl won, it would do a lot to bring the community back together.

“It would stop this distrust, chaos, and lack of respect for people with a different viewpoint,” he said.

Judd stepped down from serving as the supervisors’ chairman this week, citing family health issues, and sided with English, the Democrat, to replace her. She said she doesn’t trust Crosby to run the meetings because he goes on “rants” and has been disrespectful to county attorneys he disagreed with, such as on potential open meeting law violations.

“We need to make sure we move the county forward,” she said. “Our poor attorney doesn’t deserve to be publicly chastised just because she was doing her job.”

Crosby didn’t return requests for comment. His and Judd’s trial is set for May, two months before ballots go out for the state’s Aug. 6 primary election.

Meanwhile, Walsh isn’t the only one who wants Crosby’s spot. Clint Briseno, a Republican, is challenging him in the primary. Briseno said he had planned to run for supervisor even before the election issues began. But seeing everything unfold — especially the way Marra was treated — convinced him that the county “can do better.”

As far as the voting machines, he said the technology is a blessing for the county. Hand-counting isn’t accurate, he said.

Even if Cochise can convince residents to keep the machines, though, that’s just the start

As one of the meetings wrapped up, a woman wearing a mint-colored suit began to yell from the back of the room. The real problem with the elections, she said, was the noncitizens on the voter rolls, and coming across the border, appearing to be alluding to Trump’s latest claim that Democrats are allowing immigrants to cross the border so they can vote. That’s where the fraud is at, she said.

“Arizona alone will bring them all down.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Some Republican-led states are struggling to develop new ways to adequately update their voter rolls after withdrawing from a popular cross-state voter roll cleaning program that came under attack by far-right election activists, according to new documents and internal emails reviewed by Votebeat.

Virginia paid $29,000 in September to regain access to just a sliver of the data they used to obtain via the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. Alabama and Missouri officials took months to come up with new plans for cleaning voter rolls, landing on plans that are less rigorous than ERIC. And a new system some states are considering to help with voter roll cleanup had its server attacked and temporarily brought down, according to documents obtained by left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight and exclusively shared with Votebeat.

The documents also show that senior advisors to secretaries of state in Missouri and Texas recognized that lies were being spread about ERIC, and tried to stop their states from withdrawing from what they saw as a valuable program. In addition, officials in some states such as Ohio had pushed unsuccessfully for changes to ERIC that could have kept their states from withdrawing.*

“As you know, I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this,” Amanda Grandjean, then the senior advisor to the Ohio secretary of state, wrote in an email to ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin after Ohio withdrew from the program in March.

ERIC is a powerful tool for states to share voter information with other states, allowing them to remove duplicate or dead voters from their rolls. It has been successful mainly because of the sheer volume of the data it collects, which allows it to accurately match voter data on a large scale, and because it has worked through the complications involved in cross-referencing the different data sets and storing and transmitting the data securely.

Before the exodus of members began in early 2022, more than half of U.S. states were participating, and membership was virtually balanced between Republican- and Democratic-led states.

Clean voter rolls help ensure that eligible voters only cast one ballot, and help counties keep mail voting costs down by eliminating ineligible voters from the rolls. As states leave ERIC, not only do they lose access to the collective’s valuable data themselves, their withdrawal means the remaining states have less data with which to clean their own rolls. Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches voter roll maintenance, said this may not only undermine confidence in elections, but also could cause problems for voters at the polls whose addresses may not be up-to-date after they move, sometimes requiring them to cast a provisional ballot.

“Inaccurate rolls to me are an integrity problem,” Morse said. “But, they are also an access problem.”

The nine Republican states that have left since 2022 can’t replicate this type of system, and are instead taking a piecemeal approach that leaves them contending with a series of challenges, the documents show. For example, a working group involving several states led by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office wrestled this spring with the legality and security of data-sharing across state lines, according to emails among state officials.

In the margins of a draft agreement, an official noted they weren’t sure whether some states permitted confidential voter data to be shared in the way proposed. “Do other states’ laws allow this?” the comment read.

Hamlin, the executive director of ERIC, told Votebeat that its founding states worked for more than two years to build ERIC and “ensure what we do and how we do it complies with state and federal laws,” he said in a statement. “We also made sure data privacy and security were built into our processes and practices from the beginning.”

So far, instead of a multi-state agreement, states have instead signed individual agreements with other states.

West Virginia, for example, has signed agreements with Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee — states likely to have residents moving between them and West Virginia. West Virginia is not attempting to replace ERIC, but primarily trying to identify potentially illegal voting activity across state lines, said Donald Kersey, general counsel for the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office.

Kersey said in an email that it hasn’t been complicated.

“It naturally required states to work with each other to find time to meet and review the [memorandums of understanding], but it has been no more complicated than other MOUs our office works on with other entities or state agencies,” he wrote. Kersey said the creation of a multi-state agreement wasn’t the sole mission of the Ohio-led working group, instead describing it as “part of the discussion,” and said the state is also using other sources of data to clean its voter rolls as needed.

States were advised of ERIC’s value

The exodus from ERIC began after the far-right website The Gateway Pundit published articles in January 2022 laden with false information about the program: That it had been funded by left-wing financier George Soros and that it was run by virulent partisans who sought to pad voter rolls with liberal voters.

None of that was true, and prior to the onslaught of coverage the program was considered apolitical: A cross-partisan team of officials from member states run the program, and it’s funded out of those states’ budgets. Along with attempting to match duplicate voters across state lines, the states use the data they receive from ERIC to inform new residents of their state that they are eligible to vote. The dual purpose of the program was what initially attracted both Democratic- and Republican-led states.

When the Gateway Pundit’s articles were published, election offices across the country began to get emails from constituents demanding they leave the program. Soon, Republican secretaries of state who had long been proponents of ERIC in the past changed their tune.

Documents show that their top advisors knew that the Gateway Pundit stories were false.

The day after the first article was published on Gateway Pundit’s site, ERIC’s executive director emailed officials in ERIC member states attempting to debunk it.

“I appreciate you sharing this and will advise the Secretary,” Trish Vincent, chief of staff for Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, wrote back to Hamlin. “He has gotten some inquiries related to this horrible and misleading article.”

But in early March 2023, Ashcroft withdrew Missouri from ERIC, making it the third state to leave the program after Louisiana and Alabama. Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, and Virginia left next.

Texas was the most recent. There, too, internal emails from the Secretary of State’s Office show that officials there knew that leaving ERIC would be costly and inefficient.

When a chief of staff for a North Texas Republican state lawmaker reached out to Sam Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for communications for Secretary of State Jane Nelson, in January asking him for information about ERIC, Taylor responded with a long email explaining the importance of the program.

Taylor explained that from June to December 2022 alone, ERIC provided the office with information that led to more than 200,000 deceased or duplicate voter records being flagged for county voter registrars to investigate. He also corrected some of the inaccuracies in the Gateway Pundit story, explaining, for example, that ERIC isn’t funded by Soros.

Taylor called ERIC an “important election integrity tool,” and said without it, counties wouldn’t be able to remove certain voters from the rolls, “creating the opportunity for criminals to commit fraud in the name of a deceased person or a person who no longer lives in Texas but is still registered here.”

Nonetheless, Texas left ERIC in July.

Taylor, who no longer works for the secretary of state, told Votebeat in a text message Monday that, while ERIC was the best tool states had for cross-state voter roll cleanup, the program became less effective due to the multi-state exodus.

“And whatever new system takes its place will likely face similar scrutiny surrounding transparency, accuracy, and efficacy in helping keep voter rolls clean and up-to-date,” he said.

Some states that withdrew cited financial concerns. States spent between $37,000 and $174,000 for annual membership for the most recent fiscal year, depending on their size. But the mailings required by the program cost states as well, and the membership fees are growing as states back out of the program and fewer remain to share the burden.

But any other system may be expensive, too. In a fiscal note obtained by American Oversight for the legislation that allowed Texas to withdraw from the program, the Texas’ Secretary of State’s Office estimated that any cost savings the state would see from leaving ERIC, which cost the state $1.5 million every two years, would be “offset by the costs of participating in a different program or in developing a new program.”

Christina Adkins, elections director for the Secretary of State’s Office, estimated the office would continue to need the $1.5 million every two years for any new system it used to clean voter rolls.

Virginia has already found that getting the data that ERIC provided is costly.

In August, the state paid $3,445 just to get access to the national database that uses Social Security numbers to report deaths, the Limited Access Death Master File, and the next month the state paid $28,960 for a private company to match the files to the Virginia voter roll, one of the many services ERIC previously provided, according to receipts obtained by American Oversight. Membership to ERIC cost Virginia about $40,000 in annual dues for 2019-2020, according to a state document. The dues have since risen, but more recent data wasn’t immediately available.

States left ERIC without a replacement plan

The documents show that, in many cases, states that left ERIC didn’t have a long-term plan to replace it. At least some also lacked short-term plans for keeping voter rolls up-to-date in the meantime.

In Alabama, for example, Secretary of State Wes Allen ran his 2022 campaign for the office on a platform of removing the state from ERIC. He announced the state’s exit from ERIC immediately after taking office in January. Yet two months later, the state’s elections director was just starting to figure out how to replace it.

On March 27, Jeff Elrod sent an email to an official with the National Association of State Election Directors asking for contact information for the best person at the U.S. Postal Service to get change-of-address data for voter roll maintenance, something ERIC had provided the state.

Ashcroft withdrew Missouri from ERIC in March, though it appears the state’s counties received no formal guidance for months as to how they should now perform voter roll list maintenance without it. On June 7, the elections director of Saint Louis County wrote indicating he’d received the new guide, and asking for an electronic version of it to use for staff training.

Meanwhile, Missouri has joined other states who have departed ERIC in forming a working group to establish a new way to share voter data across state lines. As of this spring, the group was wrestling with both the legal and practical challenges around obtaining and sharing necessary data, and trading tips on possible sources for it while attempting to hammer out a draft template for agreements between states, a June email from Grandjean in Ohio to officials in the group shows.

In addition to questions about whether laws in all the states would allow confidential voter information to be shared and how, working group members also weren’t sure how often the states could commit to sharing data with each other. A draft agreement circulating at the time suggested every six months, with a note that said “Discuss.” That’s much less frequent than ERIC, which requires data sharing at least every 60 days, though it’s up to individual states how often they use the available data to update voter rolls.

Grandjean also touched on the cybersecurity questions around how data would be shared.

“We also decided that there needs to be a dedicated group of CISOs/cybersecurity professionals from our offices connected via email to discuss the secure data sharing requirements” she wrote, updating the group about a June meeting.

Lawmakers and advocates have suggested some private vendors as replacements for ERIC, but those have also faced security challenges: One private vendor marketing itself as a voter roll cleanup solution across state lines, EagleAI, faced a cyberattack in October, according to the documents.

Columbia County in Georgia recently signed up to use the system. In October, EagleAI CEO John “Rick” Richards Jr. responded to concerns from the county, including a claim that the EagleAI system had been hacked.

On Oct. 4, Richards confirmed via email that “several EagleAI network servers became inoperative,” adding that “investigation indicated it was possibly due to an attack on the Windows server software.”

In an email to Votebeat, he denied that the event — which he characterized as a “denial of service attack” — put any voter data at risk.

“Denial of service attacks happen all the time, hundreds and even thousands of times a day,” Richards wrote. “There was no breech[sic] of the EagleAI software.”

Morse said it’s not surprising to him that states are laboring to find substitutes for ERIC. ERIC took a long time to create, he said, and reflects a careful design that takes into consideration state and federal laws, as well as secure and accurate sharing of private data.

“The states withdrawing from ERIC cannot just easily stand up a copycat,” he said. “I don’t expect anyone to stand up a copycat. What I expect is for people to stand up a cheap imitation that will ultimately be worse.”

Correction, Dec. 13, 2023: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the context of the email Amanda Grandjean, then the senior advisor to the Ohio secretary of state, sent to ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin after Ohio withdrew from the program. After this article published, Grandjean told Votebeat the email, which said, “As you know, I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this,” referenced her advocacy for changes to ERIC’s requirements that might have prevented Ohio’s withdrawal. The email did not directly acknowledge that lies were being spread about ERIC.

Votebeat journalists Natalia Contreras, Carrie Levine, and Carter Walker contributed to this report.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

A federal judge will soon decide whether to allow two new Arizona laws to go into effect that would require officials to investigate the citizenship status of all voters who haven’t yet provided proof of citizenship, and to regularly check the voter rolls for noncitizens.

An army of voting rights groups, backed by the U.S. government and D.C.-based Elias Law Group, have lined up to challenge the laws, arguing they could potentially lead to eligible voters having their registration canceled and may create an uneven and discriminatory system across the state.

The laws, HB2492 and HB2243, would subject to investigation up to about 32,000 Arizona voters who have not yet provided documented proof of citizenship for their voter registration, along with future voters who can’t provide documents proving their citizenship.

Voting rights advocates told U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton that the laws would require officials to regularly use faulty or old databases to check citizenship that would likely incorrectly flag citizens, resulting in the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and an uneven system around the state. “It could have a chilling effect on our community,” Joe Garcia, executive director of Chicanos Por La Causa, a nonprofit that advocates for Hispanic communities, testified on the first day of the trial.

This is a uniquely Arizona case. That’s because federal law doesn’t require documented proof of citizenship — such as a driver’s license or tribal ID number, passport, or birth certificate – when registering to vote in federal elections. Arizona is one of just a handful of states that have enacted laws requiring this such proof, and it is the only state where the law is actively enforced, according to information provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures and other sources.

A 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case found that while Arizona could require voters to provide this proof for state and local elections, it had to allow people to vote in federal elections even if they didn’t provide the documentation. This has created a system in the state by which if someone registers to vote without proof of citizenship, they are designated a “federal-only voter” and sent a ballot with only federal races, such as the presidential and congressional races.

That’s why the state has about 32,000 voters who haven’t provided proof of citizenship and thus, are only entitled to vote in federal races.

The new laws were signed by Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022 but never went into effect because of the pending legal challenges. Bolton issued a preliminary ruling in September that decided some of the most significant portions of the laws won’t stand. That includes rules that would have blocked Arizona voters who don’t provide documented proof of citizenship from voting for president or by mail.

The trial — expected to take up to 10 days— is considering the portions of the law not yet addressed by that preliminary ruling. That includes new and complex rules for how the secretary of state, attorney general, and county recorders must investigate and regularly check voters’ citizenship status, and then cancel registrations of those they decide are not citizens.

The laws also require voters to provide their birthplace and documented proof of their address.

The judge’s preliminary decision means the remainder of the case turns on potential impacts that are difficult to prove because they haven’t happened yet — risks such as using bad data to incorrectly flag eligible voters who might miss the chance to remedy the problem before their registration is canceled, or an election official who unfairly targets certain voters.

Kory Langhofer, attorney for the Republican National Committee, which is defending the laws alongside Attorney General Kris Mayes and Republican legislative leaders, questioned on Monday why a citizen wouldn’t have any one of the many different ways to prove citizenship, such as a driver’s license, birth certificate, or tribal ID card.

Langhofer pressed voting rights organization leaders who took the stand over whether they have been able to identify any citizens who don’t have documented proof of citizenship. Out of three leaders questioned, only one said he had found such a situation — and he wasn’t able to provide particulars.

For their part, though, the state leaders defending the laws have so far not provided any evidence to the court showing that noncitizens voting has been a widespread problem in Arizona.

Janine Petty, Maricopa County’s senior director of voter registration, told the court that sometimes the county will find out about a noncitizen on the voter rolls when that person is summoned to jury duty and indicates in their response that they are not a U.S. citizen, and that information is forwarded to the county. But Petty did not indicate how often this happens, and the county did not immediately respond to a request for this information.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who attended the trial Tuesday morning, said in an interview that any time laws are enacted increasing the burden on the voter, “it increases the possibility a voter will be denied.”

Arizona Republican lawmakers and conservative groups have long believed that the lack of requirement to show proof of citizenship could allow noncitizens to vote.

Meanwhile, voting rights groups say that the issue is not that federal-only voters are noncitizens; it’s that they don’t have, or can’t easily obtain, documented proof of their citizenship.

Frequent voter citizenship checks

The bifurcated system of “federal-only ballot” voters gives the state a list of voters to target for citizenship investigations.

For example, when someone registers to vote using a form for federal-only voters, HB2492 requires county recorders to “use all available resources” to verify their citizenship. This includes a few steps that county recorders already take when registering voters, such as checking what type of driver’s license the voters have, since noncitizens are given a particular type of license, and checking a federal system that tracks citizenship status of U.S. residents.

But when recorders do the driver’s license check when someone registers and find someone has a noncitizen license, they notify the voter about their lack of proof of citizenship and give the registrant until the next general election to provide the documentation before canceling their registration. Until then, they are placed on a suspense list and not allowed to vote. Under the new law, the registration would be immediately canceled without notice.

The law also states county recorders must use any databases they can access to attempt to check citizenship — which voting rights groups worry would prompt recorders to use unofficial or faulty databases to target voters in a political or potentially discriminatory manner, such as information submitted by grassroots groups.

In a June 2022 email to county officials across the state, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer expressed concern about this when asking about the status of a related bill, according to a copy of the email shown in court on Tuesday.

“Does this get rid of the situation whereby any person can submit us lists that we then have to check? E.g. hi I used my super secret research program to figure out that these 300,000 people are not citizens. Please check the citizenship of every single one of them right now,” Richer wrote.

HB2243 requires county recorders to check citizenship of voters they have “reason to believe” are not U.S. citizens. Garcia said he believes this is meant to unfairly target new citizens, especially Latinos.

“It could be a last name that would be considered to be suspicious,” Garcia said.

The vague requirements are particularly striking because if an election official doesn’t follow the new laws, they could be found guilty of a felony, which Petty, the Maricopa election official, testified on Monday worries her colleagues. There is little guidance for what specifically recorders have to do to follow the law and no guidance on what might legally be a legitimate reason to believe someone is not a citizen.

State elections director Colleen Connor testified Tuesday that she believes any additional criminal sanctions in the law would add to the fears of doing their job, and add to the difficulty of retaining officials in an already volatile environment.

Voting rights groups are worried about another requirement for the Secretary of State’s Office to do a monthly comparison of the state’s Motor Vehicle Department database with the state’s voter rolls, to check voters’ license type — just as recorders do when someone registers to vote. In the case of these and other regular voter roll checks, the new law would give the voter 35 days to provide proof of citizenship.

Petty said, right now, when a voter registrant is notified that they are missing documentation, these registrants frequently do eventually provide proof of citizenship – and therefore are allowed to vote.

Another state, Texas, has found driver’s license type to be an inaccurate way of identifying noncitizens on voter rolls. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2019 gave counties lists of individuals on the voter rolls who had the type of license given out to noncitizens. But when counties looked into each case, election officials realized that many of them registered after naturalization, and were citizens.

If Bolton rules quickly and allows these portions of the new laws to stand, they could apply before the 2024 presidential election to people registering to vote and already-registered federal-only voters.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Election officials in Arizona are pushing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and state lawmakers to hold a special legislative session to correct what they see as a potentially impossible timeline for next year’s presidential election resulting from new federal and state laws.

County election directors and officials with the Arizona Association of Counties have been meeting with Hobbs’ staff and Republican legislative leaders, asking them to convene a special session by mid-November to consider fixes such as moving up the primary election date, condensing the timeline for counting and recounting ballots, and changing certification deadlines, Jen Marson, AACO’s executive director, told Votebeat on Wednesday.

Republican legislative leaders said in statements on Wednesday that they will work in coming months to address the issue. House Speaker Ben Toma has told AACO that the issue will be expedited during the regular session beginning in early January, likely in a concurrent special session, according to House spokesperson Andrew Wilder. A concurrent special session would allow lawmakers to address it quickly.

If the timeline is not fixed before the election cycle begins, the election directors warned in a Sept. 11 letter first reported by the Washington Post, any statewide recount in the primary election could result in military and overseas voters not getting their ballots on time. And any statewide presidential recount in the general election could mean that the state misses the federal deadline to send in the state’s presidential electors.

Coconino County Elections Director Eslir Musta said without a change for the general election, “quite frankly I don’t see a path forward in meeting the statutory deadline.”

So far, Marson said, the leaders they have spoken with have understood the timeline is a problem — but that doesn’t mean that the state’s divided leadership will be willing to consider the same solutions.

In a pair of news releases Wednesday, the Republican chairs of legislative election committees, state Sen. Wendy Rogers and state Rep. Jacqueline Parker, pledged to meet with election officials and others over the next few months to come up with a solution to the problem, which they called “urgent election deadline discrepancies.” But while Marson said simple calendar adjustments might offer the best fix, the lawmakers indicated they see this as an opportunity to make wholesale changes to election policy — something that Hobbs isn’t likely to entertain, considering her vetoes of election bills last legislative session.

“Our objective is to address the root of the problem,” Rogers wrote, “rather than simply treat the symptoms. … A true legislative fix will provide clarity, promote transparency, and will save taxpayer dollars.”

Marson and election directors that lead the Election Officials of Arizona met with Parker and Rogers on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the problem further. Waiting until January to consider legislative fixes means that any legislation would need an emergency provision to take effect in time for the primary election.

The troublesome timeline in 2024 stems from two changes: a new recount law in Arizona enacted in 2022 that was always expected to cause problems, and especially likely to drag out finalizing primary election results, but wasn’t yet in effect for 2022’s primary, and a new federal law hardening presidential election deadlines that would affect the 2024 general election.

The changes are likely on a crash course, the election directors warn.

The new recount law widened the margin of votes that triggers an automatic recount, and is expected to trigger a time-consuming statewide recount every election.

The directors have said they will likely need to start designing ballots for the general election, which rely on the primary results, before any primary recount results are final. The current timeline gives only four days for designing, proofing, and printing ballots. Musta said that typically takes weeks, including a state law-required 5-day proofing period for candidates and political parties.

“What worries me with the timeline is it doesn’t give you enough time to proof and reproof and create the checks and balances in our system to make sure that the end product is correct and it’s not rushed,” Musta said.

For the general election, any presidential recount results will need to be final before Dec. 11 for a federal deadline related to the casting of electoral votes. In 2022, half of counties weren’t done with statewide recounts at that point, and statewide recount results weren’t final until Dec. 29.

Marson said that elections directors began to realize this problem with the general election timeline as they prepared their 2024 election calendars this summer. By September, she said, they had agreed it was a universal problem.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.