Attorney General Kris Mayes held a press conference on Wednesday to announce the indictment of Arizona’s alternate slate of electors for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, along with other named and unnamed co-conspirators and unindicted co-conspirators including Trump.
Mayes made several incorrect assertions about the law.
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Attorney General Kris Mayes persuaded a grand jury to indict the 11 Arizonans who agreed to serve as a slate of alternate electors for Donald Trump had he won the 2020 election, along with others involved in the effort to resolve election illegalities in that election. They are charged with conspiracy, fraud and forgery.
According to multiple media sources, while only the 11 alternate electors are named, the other unindicted co-conspirators are considered likely to be Trump, his former attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, and Jenna Ellis, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. Their names are redacted since they have not been served yet.
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Michelle Martin, a Libertarian candidate running against Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ-01), has dropped out of the race after at least four voters said someone illegally signed her petition with their signatures. Martin’s paperwork revealed that a registered Democrat named Jeremy Garrett was one of the petition signature gatherers, along with four other registered Democrats. Someone named Jeremy Garrett works as an Electoral Campaign Manager at the progressive group Our Voice Our Vote (OVOV).
Schweikert told The Arizona Sun Times that this is clearly fraud and needs to be prosecuted. He said it has been referred to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
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California disciplinary court judge Yvette Roland, who disbarred Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman last month, contributed to a Democratic PAC last year which funneled all of the contributions to a Super PAC that seeks to stop “undermining the most basic tenet of our democracy, the right to vote.” Despite the fact that the charges against Eastman were all related to his efforts investigating and stopping election corruption in the 2020 election, Roland did not recuse herself.
While serving on the bench, Roland donated $250 twice on March 30, 2023 to Newsom for California Governor 2022 (NCG). Just 18 days later, NCG then contributed everything it had raised, about $23 million, to Campaign for Democracy Group (CDG), an independent expenditure Super PAC. CDG is primarily supporting Newsom. Its website states, “Across the country, extremist Republicans are systematically attacking the very foundations of a free society — bullying and criminalizing the most vulnerable, denying women equality and reproductive healthcare, attacking communities of color, dehumanizing immigrants seeking the American Dream, banning books and restricting speech, and undermining the most basic tenet of our democracy, the right to vote.”
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Kari Lake agreed earlier this month to settle the defamation lawsuit against her filed by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, citing the enormous cost it would take to go through a full trial. Her attorneys sent a letter on Monday to Richer’s attorneys regarding Richer’s proposed meet and confer terms, rejecting all three proposals from him, at times sarcastically.
Lake is running for the U.S. Senate and still fighting two election lawsuits, one over her loss in the gubernatorial race and another challenging the use of voting machine tabulators in elections. Richer filed a defamation lawsuit against her for stating that he intentionally sabotaged the 2022 election. Approximately 300,000 ballots in the 2022 election lacked a chain of custody, a class 2 misdemeanor, but the county has strenuously fought litigation efforts to allow Lake to inspect the ballot affidavit envelopes and other requests from her and voter integrity groups related to the election anomalies.
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Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional scholar, John Eastman, spoke to the civic organization Davos in the Desert Wednesday about the lawfare he experienced, which resulted in disbarment and prosecution. The event was part of a larger conference the organization will broadcast all day on May 21, featuring legal experts discussing the lawfare against Trump.
Eastman, who was disbarred for advising Trump and representing him in challenging election illegalities in the 2020 election, began his talk by discussing how judges dismissed many of the 2020 election lawsuits for lack of standing. A judge in Pennsylvania dismissed one of their lawsuits, claiming that only the state legislature can challenge the election illegalities. However, other judges handling the 2020 election lawsuits ruled that political parties and candidates have standing.
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The Arizona Republican Party (AZGOP) submitted a joint Amicus Curiae brief on Thursday with the Georgia Republican Party and the Republican State Committee of Delaware supporting Kari Lake’s and Mark Finchem’s Petition for Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court. The pair are appealing the lower courts’ decisions against their lawsuit challenging the use of electronic voting machine tabulators in elections. Under the new leadership of AZGOP Chair Gina Swoboda, who has a lengthy history in election integrity work including heading the Voter Reference Foundation, the AZGOP is heavily focused on election integrity.
Authored by attorney William J. Olson, the brief argues that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals erred by dismissing the case claiming Lake and Finchem lacked standing. The court affirmed the trial court’s granting of the defendants’ motion to dismiss, asserting that the pair lacked standing because “speculative allegations that voting machines may be hackable are insufficient to establish an injury in fact under Article III.” The complaint emphasized that the lower courts “conflated standing with merits, twisting the standing rules to require much more — that the complaint prove facts sufficient to grant relief.”
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Republican Brad Miller, a longtime prosecutor who served as Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Marines, where he still works as a prosecutor, is challenging incumbent Pinal County Attorney Republican Kent Volkmer, an election fraud denier, for the office. Miller points to a long list of problems with the office, including mishandling criminal issues and election integrity, as reasons change is needed.
Miller, who also practices civil law, states his principles on his website, “We must protect our borders, we must stand by and support our police, and we must safeguard our way of life.” He champions the Second Amendment, “I will protect your right to own a gun!” He said he will keep “woke policies” like ESG, “anti-American indoctrination,” and “dubious sexual education” pushed by “extreme leftist ideologies” out of education. He will “stand tall and provide a voice for parents and elected officials, allowing them to make informed decisions based on unbiased information.”
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Peter Bernegger, president of Election Watch in Wisconsin, was arrested last week after filing complaints against officials and candidates he exposed for accepting donations allegedly facilitated by progressive activists in the names of people who were unaware of them. He was charged with a felony, simulating a legal process.
Bernegger posted on X after posting bail and being released, “This is politically motivated where they are trying to shut me up, to shut us all up. For those who don’t know, this is the second time they have come after me; the first time was dismissed in 15 minutes when the judge learned the truth of the matter.”
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Ben Cotton, an IT expert proficient in forensics and digital systems analysis, issued a declaration last month about flaws with Maricopa County’s voting machine tabulators. It was included in Kari Lake’s and Mark Finchem’s latest pleadings in their complaint challenging the use of voting machine tabulators in elections. One of those findings was that unauthorized executable programs were installed on the machines at least three times during the 2020 election, which could be used to alter election results without detection.
Cotton, whose firm CyFIR was hired by the Arizona Senate in 2021 to audit the 2020 election, summarized his findings, “It is clear, based on my findings, that unauthorized programs, databases, configuration settings and actions were present on the voting systems in Maricopa County for the elections in both 2020 and 2022.”
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The Arizona Supreme Court issued a 4-2 ruling Tuesday upholding Arizona’s 1864 territorial ban on all abortion unless necessary to save the mother’s life, A.R.S. 13-3603. After the Arizona Legislature passed a law in 2022 banning abortions after 15 weeks except to save the mother’s life, A.R.S. 36-2322, Planned Parenthood challenged the older law, which was revived after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
Planned Parenthood alleged that the two laws were in conflict, so the earlier law must be struck down. After a split between the lower courts, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that the two statutes were harmonious. The court relied upon legislative language accompanying the newer law, which said it did not supersede the earlier law. Both laws penalize the provider of the abortion, not the mother.
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California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland disbarred Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman.
She issued a 128-page opinion on March 27, almost four months after she’d received the parties’ closing written statements.
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Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed a Supplemental Brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, adding support for their Petition for Writ of Certiorari and Motion to Expedite asking the court to hear an appeal of the dismissal of their lawsuit to stop the use of electronic voting machine tabulators in elections. The defendant Arizona officials failed to file a response to the pair’s petition, boosting the chances SCOTUS might accept the case and implying they did not object to the statements in the petition.
The new brief added more allegations of false representations by Maricopa County officials. It said the courts relied on their false representations when they dismissed and affirmed their case, sanctioning the pair’s lawyers. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the plaintiffs’ injuries were “too speculative” for Article III, which requires showing of an injury. The brief said the court based this determination “in part on false representations that Maricopa County performed required preelection logic and accuracy (‘L&A’) testing and used certified and approved voting system software.” The court “expressly relied on false representations that Maricopa’s elections were protected from manipulation.”
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The disciplinary trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark wrapped up on Thursday with the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary panel making a nonbinding preliminary determination that Clark was culpable on at least one of the two counts against him.
For drafting a letter that was never sent to Georgia officials advising them of their options in dealing with the 2020 election illegalities, he was charged with engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, and engaging in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice, Rules 8.4(c) and (d) of the Rules of Professional Conduct.
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The second and final week of the disbarment trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official began to wind down on Wednesday with more testimony from operations security expert Harry Haury. Clark, who is also a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution, is being disciplined for drafting a letter that was never sent to Georgia officials after the 2020 election advising them of their options for dealing with the election illegalities.
The trial is expected to wrap up on Thursday with closing statements.
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The disbarment trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, continued into its second and final week on Tuesday, featuring testimony from three witnesses for him.
Clark, a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution, is being disciplined for drafting a letter never sent to Georgia officials after the 2020 election advising them of their options for dealing with the election illegalities.
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The second week of the disbarment trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, resumed its second week on Monday. Clark, who is also a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution, is being disciplined for drafting a letter that was never sent to Georgia officials after the 2020 election advising them of their options for dealing with the election illegalities.
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The disbarment trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark began last week, featuring testimony from several prominent statisticians. Clark, who is also a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s RICO prosecution, is being disciplined for drafting a letter that was never sent to Georgia officials after the 2020 election advising them of their options for dealing with the election illegalities. The trial is expected to last two weeks, into this coming week.
Hamilton Fox, the D.C. Bar’s attorney who has aggressively gone after other Trump attorneys, attempted to keep most of Clark’s witnesses from testifying. He described them as “sketchy witnesses” who want to talk about “supposed irregularities.” However, one of the witnesses who ultimately testified on Thursday had been allowed to testify in the similar disbarment trial of Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman last year.
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State Senator Anthony Kern (R-Glendale) held a press conference on March 24 denouncing Attorney General Kris Mayes convening a grand jury to indict Arizona’s alternate slate of electors for Donald Trump from 2020. Reports circulated earlier in March that Mayes issued grand jury subpoenas to people connected to Trump’s attempt to find fraud in the 2020 election.
Kern, who is running for Congress in Arizona’s Congressional District 8 to replace outgoing Representative Debbie Lesko amidst a competitive field of primary candidates, began, “What’s so wrong about standing up for the rule of law and our Arizona constitutional principles, and when did that become a crime?”
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Attorneys for Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed additional pleadings last week with their Petition for Certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court, providing new evidence to their plea to the court to reconsider the lower courts’ rulings against their lawsuit to stop the use of voting machine tabulators. The new filings include a Motion to Expedite and declarations from top cybersecurity experts, who provided evidence that “overwhelmingly demonstrates” that the election results in 2020 and 2022 from Maricopa County contained “artificial control over the tabulation of ballots and the election results for the November 2020 election.” Additionally, they asserted that the county thwarted efforts to obtain the new data, which is a crime punishable by up to a year of incarceration.
The appendix to the Petitioners’ Motion to Expedite included 176 pages of new affidavits from Clay Parikh, Benjamin Cotton, and Walter Daugherity. Daugherity, who taught computer science and engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for 37 years and served as a computer consultant to major firms and government agencies, including classified work, said this was his second declaration filed in the case, based on the new information from Maricopa County. That information included system log files from Maricopa County’s electronic voting tabulators in the 2020 election, and according to Parikh, “a copy of Maricopa County’s election systems database and the forensic images of the vote center tabulator memory cards used in the 2020 General Election.”
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State Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli (R-Lake Havasu) and State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) held a press conference on Wednesday revealing that a cybersecurity expert discovered that voting machine software used in Maricopa County’s elections in 2020 and 2022 was compromised. Borrelli said “there is probable cause” of a crime, and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell has been notified.
Borrelli said, “A few days ago I received documentation and a sworn declaration by a cybersecurity expert that examined the data from the 2020 and 2022 elections, where it has been determined that the data and the equipment had been altered. The Election Assistance Commission never approved this altered software. In Maricopa County’s previous representation that the election software is EAC certified, including to the Arizona Senate, [that was] false [testimony].”
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The Arizona Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week from the Arizona Republican Party (AZGOP) and opposing litigant Secretary of State (AZSOS) over lower courts awarding sanctions against the AZGOP for filing a “groundless” lawsuit “in bad faith.” The AZGOP sued Arizona officials immediately after the 2020 election for conducting a post-election audit that the AZGOP contended did not comply with the law. The AZGOP said the law required the audit to be conducted at the precinct level, but the audit was conducted at the voting center level according to the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPG), which the AZGOP claimed contradicted state law.
The AZGOP said A.R.S. § 16-602 requires precinct-level audits. The relevant part of that statute, (B)(1), provides, “ At least two percent of the precincts in that county, or two precincts, whichever is greater, shall be selected at random from a pool consisting of every precinct in that county.” In contrast, the EPM states that in counties which utilize vote centers, vote centers will be used for the audits.
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Stefanie Lambert, an election integrity attorney in Michigan, was arrested on Monday in Washington D.C. for failing to appear at a court hearing in Michigan involving charges against her for allegedly breaching voting machines. After agreeing to surrender to authorities in Michigan, Lambert was released on $10,000 bond. Lambert said in court filings and a statement that she failed to show up for the hearing due to a miscommunication with her former counsel, who told her the meeting was canceled.
Lambert was arrested after taking part in a hearing Monday representing her client, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, against a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against him in 2021. Dominion sued Byrne for predicting months before the 2020 election that there would be illegal election activity to change the results of the election, and named Dominion as one of the actors involved.
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State Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Mesa) and Speaker of the House Ben Toma (R-Peoria) filed a Motion for Leave to File Brief as Amicus Curiae in the prosecution of Cochise County Supervisor Tom Crosby on March 8.
Crosby, along with Cochise County Supervisor Peggy Judd, was indicted by a grand jury in November 2023 for briefly delaying canvassing of the 2022 election in order to investigate the laws that were broken. Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes charged them with the class 5 felonies of Interference With an Election Officer—even though they were in part administering elections themselves as officials—and conspiracy since they both voted together to delay the canvassing.
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Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed a Petition for Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, appealing the dismissal of their lawsuit against Arizona officials to stop the use of electronic voting machine tabulators. The 210-page petition added new allegations stating that the defendants lied to the court and that new evidence had surfaced exposing the vulnerabilities of the machines to bad actors.
“New evidence from other litigation and public-record requests shows defendants made false statements to the district court regarding the safeguards allegedly followed to ensure the accuracy of the vote, on which the district court relied,” the petition asserted.
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Republicans have filed five election integrity lawsuits recently in Arizona, attracting the ire of election fraud denier and progressive attorney Marc Elias.
Elias issued a video last week analyzing some of the lawsuits, which he described as “anti-voting lawsuits” that seek to make it “harder to vote and easier to cheat,” part of a “plan Republicans have to undermine elections and suppress voters.”
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Hundreds turned out Thursday evening in Cave Creek for a “Win the West Rally” at Frontier Town with Kari Lake.
The former gubernatorial candidate discussed how to defeat Democrats this fall, particularly how she intended to beat Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-03) for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat.
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The Arizona Sun Times examined the outcomes of the 92 election cases challenging illegalities in the 2020 election and determined that contrary to reports in the mainstream media, almost all of the judges did not consider evidence of election fraud.
This was in large part because the lawsuits didn’t allege election fraud, which is a very specific crime that usually requires a lot of discovery. Lawsuits challenging election outcomes generally cite other laws that are broken, which has long been considered sufficient to overturn elections. Judges issued their rulings in the 2020 cases without getting into the evidence or much discovery.
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The Maricopa County Sheriff’s race has started heating up, due to former Arizona Department of Public Safety Director Frank Milstead entering the race, where he faces former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan. Sheridan, who ran unsuccessfully in 2020 for the office, took a break from shooting in the desert with his grandson to be interviewed.
Sheridan grew up in a law enforcement family in Queens, where both his dad and two uncles served as officers with the New York Police Department. He intended to enter college immediately after finishing high school, but his family moved to Arizona, and he admired his father and uncle so much that it wasn’t difficult deciding to go directly into law enforcement instead.
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The Republican primary for Maricopa County Sheriff just became a lot more interesting, with a second heavy-hitter entering the race, former Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Frank Milstead. Jerry Sheridan, who served as chief deputy under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, is already in the race, along with several lesser known candidates. Current Democratic Sheriff Paul Penzone is not running for reelection.
Milstead told The Arizona Sun Times that the reason he is running is because as a police officer, he saw how bad the crime is in Maricopa County and felt he needed to do something about it. “I live by the rule that if I’m going to complain about something, I’d better step up and do something about it,” he said.
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Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee heard arguments last week from defense attorneys about why Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from her RICO case against former President Donald Trump and his associates.
Willis had an affair with Nathan Wade, the prosecutor she appointed to lead the case. This caused attorneys, including Harry MacDougald, who represents Jeffrey Clark, to list six conflicts of interest she faces in a presentation to the court.
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Kari Lake’s attorney Bryan Blehm is encountering pushback defending himself against the State Bar of Arizona’s disciplinary proceedings. The Arizona bar is trying to disbar Blehm and two of Lake’s other attorneys for asserting in a brief that it was an undisputed fact that 35,000 ballots were inserted into the 2022 election at Runbeck Election Systems, Maricopa County’s third-party mail-in ballot processing company. The Arizona bar also brought charges against Blehm for a post on X criticizing the Arizona Supreme Court for setting up a disinformation task force that appeared to be directed in part to squelch election challenges from attorneys representing Republicans.
Blehm, who is representing himself, is in the discovery phase of the disciplinary proceedings, where parties provide disclosures to each other and serve interrogatories or subpoenas for information.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is currently under fire for appointing her former lover, Nathan Wade, as chief prosecutor in the RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and his associates, and a nationally recognized constitutional expert said that is not the only major misconduct. The expert, who preferred not to be identified, said there are five other instances of improper behavior by Willis.
The first instance was so egregious that it undermined the entire grounds for the prosecution, the expert said. The prosecution arose from a phone call between Trump, his associates, and Georgia officials discussing what to do about illegal activity in Georgia during the 2020 election. The call was recorded by a deputy secretary of state under Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was in Florida at the time. Unlike Georgia, where only one party on a phone call needs to know it is being recorded, Florida has a multi-party consent law for recording phone conversations, which means all parties on the call must know about the recording and agree to it. None of the exceptions applied, such as law enforcement or where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
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Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar, John Eastman, who is undergoing lawfare as a result of his representation of Trump in the 2020 election challenges, is facing multiple legal proceedings but is in good spirits.
Eastman, widely considered one of the top legal scholars on the right, who founded the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, served as dean for Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told The Arizona Sun Times during an interview that he remains “cheerful but defiant.”
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Both sides are calling a federal district court’s ruling a win, which upheld most of two new Arizona election integrity laws. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton struck down parts of HB 2492, which requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, and HB 2243, which requires quarterly reporting of the number of Arizona voters who did not list their citizenship status.
State Senator Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), the primary sponsor of both bills, expressed his disappointment to The Arizona Sun Times. “Bolton’s ruling is potentially the most intellectually dishonest, schizophrenic legal determination in the last half century. Bolton has shown a clear disdain for legislative authority, while simultaneously weaponizing the court against common sense. The idea that a person wouldn’t need to produce documentary proof of citizenship to vote in U.S. elections is lunacy. I can only hope that this case ultimately works its way to the U.S. Supreme Court where there still remains a semblance of sanity thanks to President Trump’s justices and the great Clarence Thomas.”
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America First Legal (AFL) “expanded a landmark Arizona election integrity case” last week, suing Yavapai County. AFL said in a press release that it withdrew the initial election integrity complaint against Maricopa County election officials due to “Maricopa County’s schemes to sabotage the case,” re-filing it in Yavapai County. The new lawsuit, which is substantially the same as the initial one, added an additional allegation, that during the 2022 elections, at least one voting center in Yavapai County had printer malfunctions that caused long lines.
James Rogers, America First Legal Senior Counsel, said in a statement, “What is Maricopa County’s response to the legitimate concerns of its citizens? Frivolous procedural motions trying to delay the case and ensure it is not heard on its merits. This voluntary dismissal is not the end of this case, but just the beginning.”
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State Representative Justin Heap (R-Mesa) announced at the State Capitol during a press conference on Wednesday that he will enter the Republican primary race for Maricopa County Recorder, challenging incumbent Stephen Richer.
Richer has come under extensive criticism for maintaining that there were only minor problems during the 2022 election, fighting back through the courts against attempts to obtain public records about the election and other related election integrity lawsuits.
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A panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Monday that the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) unconstitutionally subpoenaed documents from former President Donald Trump’s former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark in violation of his Fifth Amendment rights.
In addition to facing ODC disciplinary charges for his role in assisting Trump in handling the 2020 presidential election irregularities, Clark was indicted along with Trump and others in Georgia and is an unnamed co-conspirator in another case. The court issued its decision immediately after a hearing on Friday.
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Cochise County Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd are fighting back against Attorney General Kris Mayes’ prosecution of them for voting to delay certification of the 2022 election by three days. The pair filed motions last week requesting that the case be dismissed and challenging the grand jury’s finding of probable cause against them.
In Crosby’s Motion to Dismiss, which Judd joined later, Crosby’s attorney Dennis Wilenchik said, “The criminal statute involved is vague and ambiguous and overbroad, and unconstitutional as applied here to a member of a Board of Supervisors of a County voting in his official capacity. The case was brought purely for political purposes by the Attorney General and is an egregious abuse of her powers.”
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Opposition is increasing to the judges assigned to handle election related lawsuits in Arizona, as their biases are being revealed. After Arizona Senate Majority leader Warren Petersen (R-Mesa) and House Speaker Ben Toma (R-Peoria) requested that Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Tim Ryan recuse himself from their lawsuit challenging the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM) because of his progressive activist older brother’s posts on X, Ryan voluntarily recused himself.
The Arizona State Senate Republican Caucus issued an announcement praising the recusal. “His brother, Tom Ryan, is a liberal attorney who plagues social media with his contempt for the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature with an incessant number of juvenile posts,” the statement said. “There is no way anyone who has witnessed the antics of Judge Ryan’s brother, which included case-specific criticisms and commentary, can credibly believe that Judge Ryan could give the Legislature a fair trial.”
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The Scottsdale City Council (SCC) has been approving plans to eliminate lanes on roads in the city and replace them with bicycle lanes, known as “road diets.” This is causing a wave of concern from Scottsdale residents over the increasing traffic congestion. A road diet that was approved last March particularly angered residents since it was located in the city’s popular Old Town entertainment district. Mason Gates, one of the candidates running for the SCC this year, has made opposition to them a priority.
Gates spoke at an SCC meeting on February 20 against road diets. He said he had a discussion with a business owner located near the Old Town road diet, who said he was not consulted in preliminary talks before the SCC decided to construct a road diet there. Protect Scottsdale reported that 23 business owners in the vicinity signed a petition opposing the road diet, but their concerns were dismissed. According to Gates, Rich Bonura, the owner of BEG Bakery, told him “he often sees buses, semi-trucks, and other vehicles parked in the bike lane that is intended for cyclists. This can pose a grave danger for cyclists who need to avoid parked vehicles by swerving into traffic lanes where drivers may not expect to see them.”
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Some Republicans on the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) are resisting calls to stop Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) plans by the utilities they regulate, and the controversy has extended to the upcoming fall election.
Three of the five seats are up for election: two are wide open, and the third is held by Commissioner Lea Márquez Peterson, who is seeking reelection. While two new Republican candidates appear to be running as a slate with Márquez Peterson, newcomer Christy Kelly is running alone on a platform that emphasizes stopping ESG, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and the Green New Deal.
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The Goldwater Institute (GI) sued the U.S. Department of Education last week over fining Grand Canyon University (GCU) almost $40 million.
The fine was purportedly for “insufficiently inform[ing] PhD students that they may have to take continuing courses while completing their doctoral dissertations,” GI said in a press release. GI noted that the $37 million fine against the Christian university “is 10 times bigger than penalties the Education Department assessed against Penn State and Michigan State for covering up the sexual crimes of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar.”
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A couple of Arizona’s largest school districts have been rocked with scandals lately, mainly over administrations trying to implement woke agendas.
However, the Deer Valley Unified School District (DVUSD), located in northwest Phoenix and surrounding cities, has escaped much of the controversy. Paul Carver, who sits on the governing board, said he believes it is because his district stresses transparency and teamwork. He said the superintendent has regular interfaith meetings, which have been transferred to Zoom since COVID-19, and the superintendent and many board members try to include everyone regardless of demographics.
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Abe Hamadeh continues his election litigation challenging his 280-vote loss to Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, including filing a Petition for Writ of Quo Warranto to remove Mayes from office. This past week, he filed a response to the Arizona officials’ Motions to Dismiss that lawsuit.
Represented by Ryan Heath of Heath Law, Hamadeh laid out the status of the case in the opening of his 43-page Response. “Respondent Kris Mays, Defendant Fontes, and the Maricopa County Defendants seek to deny Petitioner and many other voters their fundamental rights guaranteed by the Arizona Constitution for the sake of expediency,” he said. “The Maricopa County Defendants also seek to avoid accountability for their failures, which plausibly resulted in thousands (and likely hundreds of thousands) of illegal votes affecting the results of the 2022 General Election for the office of Attorney General (the ‘Contested Race’). Due to Maricopa County officials’ lack of candor, the circumstances permitting Petitioner to bring this action were not known — and could not have been known — until more than half a year after the official canvass was taken for the Contested Race.’
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The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) filed a lawsuit last week against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, accusing him of making illegal changes to the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM). Represented by the America First Policy Institute, Davillier Law Group, and Grand Canyon Legal Center, AFEC said the revisions improperly place protected political speech at risk of criminal prosecution and have an unconstitutional chilling effect on protected political speech.
“Secretary Fontes has produced one of the most radical elections procedures manuals in our state’s history,” said Scot Mussi, AFEC’s president. “If the illegal provisions of this manual are allowed to stand, the integrity and transparency of state elections would continue to dissipate at the hands of leftwing ideologues. We hope the court agrees with our arguments and forces the Secretary to adhere to state law.”
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The Senate Elections Committee heard a presentation from We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) co-founder Shelby Busch on Monday regarding its plan for restoring trust in elections by including hand counts of ballots.
Both the Arizona Republican Party, the Maricopa County Republican Committee (MCRC), and Arkansas Republicans have already implemented the AVII method, which is known as the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, in its party elections. Republicans in Arkansas want to make the AVII method law by putting the question to voters as a constitutional amendment.
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Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell will face the same challenger in the Republican primary this year as she did in the 2022 special election Gina Godbehere.
Godbehere announced her campaign last week. The Maricopa County Supervisors chose Mitchell in early 2022 to replace the previous county attorney, Alistar Adel, who resigned from office due to health issues. Adel passed away in 2022. Mitchell has accumulated considerable criticism from Republicans for actions such as representing the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) twice, asking for sanctions against Kari Lake’s election attorneys.
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America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Maricopa County, alleging numerous violations of election law since 2020. Some of the issues raised in the complaint were brought up in similar lawsuits brought around the country challenging irregularities in the 2020 election, where judges found they had merit.
The AFL listed eight issues in its complaint, and mainly asked for declaratory judgment to stop the county from repeating the wrongdoing and comply with law. The first was lack of chain of custody for tens of thousands of ballots, a class 2 misdemeanor. The second was failure to conduct reconciliation as required by law, which refers to comparing the number of votes cast at polling centers to the number of voters who checked in. The third was the failure of the voting center printers, disenfranchising voters. The fourth was the racially discriminatory location of vote centers, disadvantaging Native Americans and whites who lived farther from the locations than others.
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The CONELRAD Group, a team of mostly former intelligence and military officers located primarily in southern Arizona that exposed what it believes is malfeasance in Pinal County’s 2022 election, has teamed up with the Pima Integrity Project (PIP) to expose similar malfeasance in Pima County’s elections. Led by database expert Tim Laux, the group of election researchers in PIP said it believes it found doctored canvassing reports and large numbers of newly registered voters who voted before they were eligible, among other illegal activities.
Jack Dona of CONELRAD told The Arizona Sun Times the findings could rise to the level of criminal racketeering. Dona holds 43 intelligence and technical certifications and diplomas from civilian colleges, technical schools, and military academies and served in military intelligence, retiring as a master sergeant/first sergeant.
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