Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer answers questions on when Arizona election results get released, tabulation and other election topics.
First came a lawsuit challenging the accuracy of Arizona's voter registration rolls.
The next day, another lawsuit questioned the security of Maricopa County's ballot-counting machines.
The complaints, filed in the final days of October, are among a barrage of late-arriving legal cases that appear poised to lay the groundwork for post-election challenges before voting ends in battleground Arizona.
The trend is a national one. At least 29 election-related lawsuits were filed across the country in October, according to a log kept by the Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning media platform that tracks voting litigation. Although many were in seven key swing states, the challenges popped up across the country, from Oregon to Florida.
Two more complaints, both involving Georgia voter-certification processes, were filed Nov. 1, just four days ahead of the election.
Challenges seeking to overturn election results aren't new in the desert. Losing candidates in 2020 and 2022 sued, hoping to change the outcomes of their races. But most of those challenges were filed after results were in.
This time, the flurry of lawsuits coming just days before the election has set off alarm bells for some national and local experts.
Many of the lawsuits deal with voter registration. The cases challenge the status of overseas voters, whether noncitizen votes are being cast, and, in the case of Arizona, whether election officials have properly maintained the voter lists.
Hayden Johnson, an attorney with Protect Democracy, calls these challenges "zombie lawsuits" because they are unlikely to affect the actual conduct of the election. Instead, they're poised to rise up after votes have been counted.
Protect Democracy is a nonpartisan nonprofit that describes itself as working to defeat authoritarian threats in the United States.
Hayden said one of the problematic issues with the voter registration challenges is timing. There was plenty of time to raise issues about registration long before the election, he said. That leads him to question the late complaints.
"If they were serious issues, they should have been raised much earlier," Johnson said.
Locally, Daniel Hernandez echoed that concern. Hernandez is a former Democratic state lawmaker working with the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan group of current and former elected officials that aims to strengthen democracy by reestablishing trust in election processes.
"I think we're seeing the laying of the foundation for the outcome of the election to be challenged on Wednesday," he said, referring to the day after the election. "This is setting up another attempt to undermine the integrity of the election."
But Arizona attorney Kory Langhofer said there can be sincere reasons for late filings. He previously worked for former President Donald Trump's campaign during the 2020 election. He is not involved in any of the last-minute litigation in Arizona.
Election integrity is top of mind for many activists, he said, dismissing suggestions that the lawsuits are being deliberately filed to get a foot in the courthouse door in case an election contest doesn't work out the way conservatives hoped.
The problem is timing: Both the Arizona Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court don't look favorably on last-minute lawsuits, Langhofer said.
"It's just bad planning," he said.
Recent cases in Arizona focus on voter rolls, tabulators
With the clock ticking toward Nov. 5, two lawsuits landed in Arizona last week.
California-based nonprofit Citizen AG, also known as the 1789 Foundation, sued Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Wednesday. The organization's attorneys argued as many as 1.2 million registered voters may be ineligible and should be removed from the list based on data from a 2020 survey by the Election Assistance Commission.
The group sought a court order to have Fontes' office immediately remove the contested names from the registration records.
A day later, the Maricopa County Republican Committee sued the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. It alleged the county is improperly allowing election workers to use passwords issued by Dominion Voting Systems to access the company's vote-counting machines.
That violates a state law that bars the use of any vendor-supplied password, the party argued. It asked for an injunction to stop the use of these passwords or if a decision comes too late for vote counting, detailed records on how the vote count proceeded.
The Maricopa County Republicans are still awaiting a ruling in their case. But U.S. District Court Judge Steven P. Logan denied Citizen AG's request late Friday.
Logan wrote there was no evidence to support the claim that the Secretary of State's Office was not following the National Voter Registration Act and its requirement to keep rolls up-to-date.
But Logan did agree Citizen AG has the right to inspect records related to voter list maintenance. He set a Dec. 2 deadline for election officials to provide those documents.
In court, Logan questioned why the Citizen AG case was filed less than a week before the election.
"If Citizen AG was so concerned," Logan asked, "why wait until days before the election? Why wait so long?"
Attorney Nicole Pearson, who represented the nonprofit organization, said the updated cleaned-up voter list was only available as of early August. She noted the group has a small staff and attorneys are paid through donations.
Logan noted Citizen AZ filed a similar case in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. He asked Pearson why the group is suing two swing states.
Pearson said it had nothing to do with swing-state status. She said Arizona and Pennsylvania have Citizen AG members who are very concerned with their requests for voter list information being blocked by election officials.
There's another deadline looming: Fontes has until noon Monday to hand over a list of 98,000 registered voters impacted by a citizenship tracking glitch.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney set that deadline in a public records case brought by the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, a conservative group. He also ordered Fontes to produce emails and other communications related to another 118,000 voters affected by the same database issue involving proof of citizenship.
Fontes is seeking emergency relief from the Arizona Court of Appeals, arguing that release of the voter list could lead to harassment and violence.
He's asked the appeals court to stay Blaney's deadline until a separate appeal he filed on Friday can be considered. He also asked for a decision on the emergency stay before the Monday deadline for producing documents.
Fontes said the risk of harassment and violence if the names of the more than 216,000 affected voters are released outweighs the importance of producing public records promptly.
"At bottom, this case concerns the intersection of our violent politicallandscape and Arizona's public records statutes," Fontes' attorneys wrote.
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