The primary elections in New Mexico in June 2022 were largely unremarkable. Candidates ran, voters participated, ballots were counted, and election results were announced. It couldn’t have been more routine — except for one thing.
As regular readers might recall, in New Mexico’s Otero County, some Republican commissioners balked at certifying the results of local primary races. These GOP officials didn’t have any specific reasons to reject the results, but they had some conspiracy theories related to voting machines, so they refused to do their jobs based on their baseless hunches.
Eventually, New Mexico’s secretary of state filed suit, and the state Supreme Court issued an order that the Republicans agreed to follow. But the fact that these extra steps were necessary was unsettling. An Associated Press report described the mess in New Mexico at the time as “a preview of the kind of chaos election experts fear is coming in the fall midterms and in 2024.”
The article quoted Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Colorado and Utah who now advises federal, state, and local officials, saying, “We are in scary territory. If this can happen here, where next? It’s like a cancer, a virus. It’s metastasizing and growing.”
That quote came to mind reading this NBC News report out of Arizona.
A grand jury voted to indict two local officials who delayed the certification of midterm election results in 2022 in Cochise County, Arizona, state Attorney General Kris Mayes said Wednesday. Cochise County Supervisors Peggy Judd, 61, and Tom Crosby, 64, voted against certifying the county’s election results by the statutory deadline in 2022, after months of casting baseless doubt on the integrity of the election.
A report in The Arizona Republic added that the local GOP officials, in the wake of last fall’s elections, forced a delay in the certification process, saying they wanted to consider questions about voting machines. “By that time,” the…
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