Arizona Republicans continue to be among the most extreme conservatives in the nation.
The latest evidence of that comes in a letter written by Sonny Borrelli, the majority leader of the Arizona Senate. The Republican told all Arizona counties that they must follow a nonbinding resolution passed by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature that bans the use of electronic voting machines in upcoming elections.
The letter, which has been denounced even by Republican officials in Arizona, shows that former President Donald Trump and his illiberal minions who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election still wield power heading into 2024.
Here’s how it all played out.
Last week, Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have prohibited the use of electronic voting machines unless they met a host of right-wing requirements, including a mandate that all of the machine’s parts be American-made. Arizona Republicans have been the most obnoxious group in the nation to lob baseless allegations about voting machines ever since Trump lost in 2020.
But in his letter to county officials, Borrelli claims that despite the requirements not being signed into law, the counties must still comply with Republicans’ demands because of the nonbinding resolution. The resolution cited machines provided by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been at the center of many of conservatives’ election conspiracy theories.
And Borrelli leaned into arguments made by people intimately involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
As the Arizona Mirror reported:
In his letter sent to Arizona’s 15 counties, Borrelli states that Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives state legislators the authority to make these sorts of changes to elections. This legal theory of state legislatures and “plenary power” has become a focus of some on the right, and has been pushed for by attorneys like John…
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