Breaking lawsuits challenge records, procedures

First, a lawsuit was filed challenging the accuracy of Arizona’s voter registration lists.

The next day, another lawsuit was filed calling into question the security of vote-counting machines in Maricopa County.

The complaints, filed in late October, are among late-arriving legal cases that appear poised to set the stage for post-election challenges before voting ends in the battleground state of Arizona.

The trend is a national trend. At least 29 election-related lawsuits were filed across the country in October, according to records kept by Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning media platform that tracks voting cases. Challenges have emerged across the country, from Oregon to Florida, although most are in seven key states.

Two more complaints were filed on November 1, just four days before the election, both involving voter certification processes in Georgia.

Challenges aimed at overturning election results are not new in the desert. Losing candidates in 2020 and 2022 filed lawsuits in hopes of changing the results of their races. But most of these challenges were made after the results were in.

This time, the flurry of lawsuits just days before the election caused alarm bells to ring for some national and local experts.

Most of the cases involve voter registration. The lawsuits challenge the status of overseas voters, whether noncitizen votes were cast and, in Arizona’s case, whether election officials properly maintained voter rolls.

Protect Democracy attorney Hayden Johnson calls these challenges “zombie lawsuits” because they are unlikely to affect the actual course of the election. Instead, they are preparing to stand up after the votes are counted.

Protecting Democracy is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that describes itself as working to defeat authoritarian threats in the United States.

Hayden said one of the problematic issues with voter registration challenges is timing. He said there is plenty of time to raise registration issues well before the election. This leads him to question late complaints.

“If these were serious issues, they should have been raised much earlier,” Johnson said.

Locally, Daniel Hernandez also expressed this concern. Hernandez is a former Democratic state lawmaker who works for the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan group of current and former elected officials that aims to strengthen democracy by restoring trust in election processes.

“I think the foundations were laid for objecting to the election results on Wednesday,” he said, referring to the day after the election. “This is the beginning of a new attempt to undermine the integrity of the election.”

But Arizona attorney Kory Langhofer said there may be genuine reasons for late filings. He previously worked on former President Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2020 election. He was not involved in any of the last-minute lawsuits in Arizona.

He said election integrity is a top priority for many activists and dismissed suggestions that the lawsuits were deliberately filed to get a foot in the door of the courthouse if the election race does not turn out as conservatives hope.

The problem is timing: Both the Arizona Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court do not look favorably on last-minute cases, Langhofer said.

“This is just bad planning,” he said.

Recent cases in Arizona focus on voter rolls and tabulations

As the clock approaches November 5, two lawsuits were filed in Arizona last week.

California-based nonprofit Citizen AG, also known as the 1789 Foundation, filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Wednesday. The organization’s lawyers argued that as many as 1.2 million registered voters may not be eligible to vote and should be removed from the list, based on data from a 2020 survey by the Election Assistance Commission.

The group requested a court order to have Fontes’ office immediately remove the disputed names from the registry records.

A day later, the Maricopa County Republican Committee filed a lawsuit against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. He alleged that the district improperly allowed election workers to use passwords issued by Dominion Voting Systems to access the company’s vote-counting machines.

The party argued that this violated a state law prohibiting the use of any merchant-provided passwords. He asked for detailed records of how the vote count was progressing, in case the use of these passwords was stopped or the decision to count votes came too late.

Maricopa County Republicans are still awaiting a decision in their lawsuit. But U.S. District Court Judge Steven P. Logan denied Citizen AG’s request late Friday.

Logan wrote that there is no evidence to support the State Department’s claim that it failed to comply with the National Voter Registration Act and its requirement to keep its lists up to date.

However, Logan agreed that the Citizen AG had the right to review records related to the maintenance of the voter list. He gave election officials until December 2 to provide these documents.

Logan questioned in court why the Citizen AG lawsuit was filed less than a week before the election.

“If Citizen AG is so concerned, why did you wait until days before the election? Why did you wait so long?” Logan asked. he asked.

Attorney Nicole Pearson, who represents the nonprofit, said the updated purged voter list was only available as of early August. He noted that the group has a small staff and lawyers are paid through donations.

Citizen AZ filed a similar lawsuit in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Logan said. He asked Pearson why the group was suing two swing states.

This has nothing to do with the swing state situation, Pearson said. He said there are Citizen AG members in Arizona and Pennsylvania who are extremely concerned about voter roll information being withheld by election officials.

The Pennsylvania case is still open.

Monday deadline for election registration lawsuit

There’s another deadline looming: Fontes must deliver a list of 98,000 registered voters affected by the citizenship tracking glitch by noon Monday.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney made this deadline A public records lawsuit filed by the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, a conservative group. He also ordered Fontes to prepare emails and other communications regarding 118,000 other voters affected by the same database issue involving proof of citizenship.

Fontes is seeking emergency relief from the Arizona Court of Appeals, arguing that releasing the voter list could lead to harassment and violence.

He asked the appeals court to delay the deadline so that a separate appeal Blaney filed Friday could be considered. He also requested that the decision on the emergency stay be made before the document submission deadline expires on Monday.

Fontes said the risk of harassment and violence that could occur if the names of more than 216,000 affected voters were released would outweigh the importance of promptly preparing public records.

“In essence, this case is about the intersection of our violent political landscape and Arizona’s public records legislation,” Fontes’ attorneys wrote.

Reach the reporter’s address [email protected] or call him at 602-228-7566 and follow him on Threads as well as on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter @maryjpitzl.

Sasha Hupka is responsible for county government and election administration for the Arizona Republic. reach out to him [email protected]. Follow him on X: @SashaHupka. Follow him on Instagram or Topics: @sashahupkasnaps. Sign up for the weekly election newsletter, Republic Census.