Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey F. The lone Democrat on the board opposed the hand-count. The two Republican supervisors who voted to do the 100% hand-count rather than the small sample done in every other election were pushed to do so by people who believe former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that fraud or counting problems with voting machines led to his loss in 2020. “But they did vote - it was a two-to-one vote - they voted for me to do this and a 100% count.” “The court will decide if it’s legal or not,” he said. ![]() Stevens said the Cochise County board of supervisors had voted on the plan and authorized him to conduct the count. That bars a full hand-count of the early votes, she said. But he acknowledged he’s bypassing the county elections director, who by law oversees the process and is responsible for securely holding the ballots.Īnd responding to questions from the lawyer for the Arizona Alliance of Retired Americans, Lalitha Madduri, Stevens said he planned to count an estimated 30,000 early ballots despite provisions in the law that limit early ballot hand-count audits to 1% or 5,000 ballots, whatever is less, and that they be randomly selected. He vowed to follow the law that lays out rules for the much-smaller hand-count audits done to check machine vote-counting equipment. Stevens said he plans to start the hand-count after voting ends Tuesday and use more than 250 volunteers he’s recruited from three political parties, although the group is heavily tilted towards registered Republicans. He defended the plan, which is highly unusual and stands as nearly unprecedented in the state. ![]() The elections director testified that she faces a potential felony if implementing the plan ends up violating the law.Ĭochise County Recorder David Stevens was grilled in court by lawyers representing a retiree group suing to block the effort. PHOENIX (AP) - A southern Arizona judge heard from a parade of witnesses Friday in a case brought by opponents of an unusual plan driven by local officials who question the accuracy of ballot-counting machines and want to hand-count all the ballots in the election that concludes next week.Īmong those taking the stand was an elected Republican official in rural Cochise County who has agreed to take over the county election director’s normal job of conducting a post-election audit of the vote count by hand - this time expanding it from a small effort using a sample of ballots to a massive one covering four races on about 40,000 ballots. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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