A judge issued an order Monday blocking an Arizona county from conducting a full ballot hand count.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey F. McGinley made the ruling after a Nov. 4 hearing that lasted a full day.
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McGinley said the Cochise County Board of Supervisors overstepped its authority by ordering the hand count of all ballots cast in the midterm election rather than the sample allowed by state law.
The Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans filed the lawsuit to stop the hand count. It argued state law only allows a small number of ballots to be counted by hand to ensure voting machine accuracy and that a hand count could cause a delay in certifying the election results, the Associated Press reported.
On Oct. 24, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 to hand-count all ballots cast in the Nov. 8 general election. The board reversed its decision to hand-count all ballots after being threatened with legal action by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Hobbs, a Democrat, is running for the governor’s seat against Republican Kari Lake.
However, the board renewed its plan to hand-count ballots after an informal opinion from the Attorney General’s Office said county officials could hand-count ballots in at least five races.
Cochise County has the discretion to perform an expanded hand-count audit of all early ballots and ballots cast in person “so long as the expanded hand count audit of statewide and federal races is limited to five contested statewide and federal races appearing on the 2022 General Election ballot,” according to the opinion issued by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich on Oct. 28.
The lawsuit only challenged the total hand count of the early ballots. However, the ruling blocked hand counts of both early ballots and those cast on Election Day.
McGinley wrote that state election laws had a procedure for randomly selecting ballots for hand-counting, stressing that “ballots be randomly selected for a hand count” and “by common definition, a selection of precincts is not random if all precincts are chosen.”
“This entire process would be rendered superfluous if the court were to construe (that section) to initially select 100% of the precinct ballots as its starting point,” the judge wrote. “Because the statute does not permit elections officials to begin the precinct hand-count by counting all ballots cast, the Board’s requirement that elections officials do so here is unlawful.”
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Peggy Judd, one of two Republicans on the three-member Cochise County board of supervisors, told the Associated Press she didn’t know if an appeal would happen.
“I am delighted to have a ruling to have something to go with,” Judd told the Associated Press. “I still am 100% positive that what we were doing was OK and the right thing to do.”
