WASHINGTON (AP) — Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s switch from Democrat to independent won’t change the balance of power in the Senate. But it could affect her political fortunes back home.
Sinema says she won’t caucus with Senate Republicans, so Democrats will still hold the majority next year. And she is expected to continue casting most of her votes with Democrats while separating herself on certain issues.
“Nothing’s going to change for me,” Sinema declared in a video announcing her decision.
A look at what Sinema’s decision means:
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE SENATE
Not much. Democrats will still be in charge, and day to day operations won’t change for Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Sinema is still holding her Democratic committee assignments, meaning she can’t upend the party structure too much.
It is unclear exactly what the Senate’s party balance will be, and whether she will still caucus with Democrats – meaning she would be counted as one of their ranks. If she does, Democrats will have a 51-49 majority. If she doesn’t, the balance would be 50-49, with Sinema voting as an independent. Either way, Democrats will have a majority.
“We will maintain our new majority on committees, exercise our subpoena power and be able to clear nominees without discharge votes,” Schumer said in a statement on Sinema’s decision.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC AGENDA
Again, it’s unlikely that Sinema’s move will change the party’s path forward, especially now that Republicans will be in the House majority, and little legislation will move through Congress.
Sinema has always voted in an independent manner – championing some party priorities such as same-sex marriage, which she was instrumental in negotiating before Senate passage last week, and opposing others such as a minimum wage increase. She and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., helped water down much of President Joe Biden’s social spending agenda in the first two years of his presidency.
She has generally voted for Biden’s executive and judicial nominations, as well.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR SINEMA
What it means for Sinema in Arizona is a trickier question.
Democrats are likely to put up a new candidate and put her in a three-way race for reelection in 2024, if she decides to run again. Voters will decide if they like her independent style, modeled after the late Sen. John McCain, or if they would prefer a partisan on the right or left.
“My approach is rare in Washington, and has upset partisans in both parties,” she said.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced Friday she has registered as an independent, a renegade move that could bolster her political brand but won’t upend the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority. She says she will not caucus with Republicans.
Sinema, who faces reelection in 2024, has been a vibrant yet often unpredictable force in the Senate, tending toward the state’s independent streak and frustrating Democratic colleagues at times with her overtures to Republicans and opposition to Democratic priorities.
“I just don’t fit well into a traditional party system,” Sinema she said in an interview Friday.
In the interview, Sinema said she hasn’t decided whether she will run for reelection. But she said this was the time to be “true to myself and true to the values of the Arizonans I represent.”
“I don’t expect anything to change for me,” she said. “This will just be a further affirmation of my style of working across all the political boundaries with anyone to try and get something done.”
While unusual for a sitting senator to switch party affiliation, Sinema’s decision may well have more impact on her own political livelihood than the operations of the Senate. She plans to continue her committee positions through the Democrats. Her move comes just days after Democrats had expanded their majority to 51-49 for the new year, following the party’s runoff election win in Georgia.
In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sinema had informed him of her decision and asked to keep her committee assignments — effectively keeping her in the Democratic fold.
“Kyrsten is independent; that’s how she’s always been,” Schumer said. “I believe she’s a good and effective senator and am looking forward to a productive session in the new Democratic majority Senate.”
The Democrats “will maintain our new majority on committees, exercise our subpoena power and be able to clear nominees without discharge votes,” he said.
In case of tie votes, Vice President Kamala Harris will continue to provide the winning vote for Democrats.
Sinema, who has modeled her political approach on the maverick style of the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, will join a small but influential group of independent senators aligned with the Democrats — Sen. Angus King of Maine and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
At the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre praised Sinema as a “key partner” in passing some of President Joe Biden’s priorities and said the switch “does not change the new Democratic majority control of the Senate. … We have every reason to expect that we will continue to work successfully with her.” Sinema informed the White House on Thursday afternoon about her plans to formally leave the Democratic Party, according to a person familiar with the discussion and granted anonymity to disclose a private conversation.
Sinema has been at the center of many deals brokered during this session of Congress — from a big, bipartisan infrastructure package Biden signed into law to the landmark bill approved this week to legally protect same-sex marriages.
The move to forgo a political party will scramble the Senate election landscape for 2024 as Democrats already face a tough path to maintaining Senate control. Her switch risks splitting the Democratic vote in Arizona between her and the eventual Democratic nominee, giving Republicans a solid opening.
A splintered ballot could help Republican recruiting efforts as they seek to perform better than their losses in the recent midterm elections. A weak GOP field contributed to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s reelection in Arizona last month.
A political action committee, Primary Sinema, that is raising money to support a potential challenger, said the money it has already raised will now be used to back “a real Democrat” in 2024.
Abandoning the Democratic Party is a striking evolution for a politician who began her career as a Green Party member and antiwar activist known as a “Prada socialist.” The shift has been particularly vexing for progressive activists who now see her as one of their chief antagonists.
In a video explaining her decision, she said: “Showing up to work with the title of independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been.”
The first-term Sinema wrote Friday in The Arizona Republic that she came into office pledging “I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama. I promised I would never bend to party pressure.”
She wrote that her approach is “has upset partisans in both parties” but “has delivered lasting results for Arizona.”
Ahead of the 2024 elections, Sinema is likely to be matched against a well-funded primary challenger after angering much of the Democratic base by blocking or watering down progressive priorities such as a minimum wage increase and Biden’s big social spending initiatives.
Sinema’s most prominent potential primary challenger is Rep. Ruben Gallego, who has a long history of feuding with her.
The senator wrote that she was joining “the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington.”
Sinema bemoaned “the national parties’ rigid partisanship” and said “pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges — allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities, and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.”
“In catering to the fringes, neither party has demonstrated much tolerance for diversity of thought. Bipartisan compromise is seen as a rarely acceptable last resort, rather than the best way to achieve lasting progress,” she wrote.
Along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, she has been one of two moderate Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, and her willingness to buck the rest of her party has at times limited the ambitions of Biden and Schumer.
Sinema is a staunch defender of the filibuster, a Senate rule effectively requiring 60 votes to pass most legislation in the 100-member Senate. Many Democrats, including Biden, say the filibuster leads to gridlock by giving a minority of lawmakers the ability to veto.
Last January, leaders of the Arizona Democratic Party voted to censure Sinema, citing “her failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of our democracy″ — namely her refusal to go along with fellow Democrats to alter the Senate rule so they could overcome Republican opposition to a voting rights bill.
While that rebuke was symbolic, it came only a few years since Sinema was heralded for bringing the Arizona Senate seat back into the Democratic fold for the first time in a generation. The move also previewed the persistent opposition that Sinema was likely face within her own party in 2024.
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Cooper reported from Phoenix. AP writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this story.
Semiconductor giant TSMC was feted this week by US President Joe Biden and Apple CEO Tim Cook during a ceremony to unveil its $40 billion manufacturing site in Arizona — a huge investment designed to help secure America’s supply of the most advanced chips.
But back home in Taiwan, there is deep unease over the growing political and commercial pressure being applied to the world’s most important chipmaker to expand internationally. The company is building a facility in Japan and considering investing in Europe.
“They’re like the Hope Diamond of semiconductors. Everybody wants them,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, a research organization specializing in chips. (The Hope Diamond is the world’s largest blue diamond, which now resides at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington.)
“Customers in China want them to build there. Customers in the US want them there. And customers in Europe want them there too,” he added.
Apart from the risk that TSMC will take its most advanced technology with it — stripping Taiwan of one of its unique assets and reducing employment opportunities locally — there are fears that a diminished presence for the company could expose Taipei to greater pressure from Beijing, which has vowed to take control of the self-ruled island, by force if necessary.
TSMC is considered a national treasure in Taiwan and supplies tech giants including Apple
(AAPL) and Qualcomm
(QCOM). It mass produces the most advanced semiconductors in the world, components that are vital to the smooth running of everything from smartphones to washing machines.
The company is perceived as being so valuable to the global economy, as well as to China — which claims Taiwan as its own territory despite having never controlled it — that it is sometimes even referred to as forming part of a “silicon shield” against a potential military invasion by Beijing. TSMC’s presence gives a strong incentive to the West to defend Taiwan against any attempt by China to take it by force.
“The idea is that if Taiwan became a powerhouse in semiconductors, then America would have to support and defend it,” said Hutcheson. “The strategy has been super successful.”
A day before Tuesday’s Phoenix ceremony Chiu Chenyuan, a lawmaker with the opposition Taiwan People’s Party, grilled Foreign Minister Joseph Wu about whether there is a “secret deal” with the United States to disadvantage Taiwan’s chip industry.
Chiu claimed that the chip giant was under political pressure to move its operations and its most advanced technology to the US. He cited the transfer of 300 people, including TSMC engineers, to the Arizona plant. In response, Wu said there was no secret deal, nor was there any attempt to diminish the importance of Taiwan to TSMC.
Patrick Chen, the Taipei-based head of research at CL Securities Taiwan, said there was a common concern on the island about TSMC’s growing international importance, the pressure it is facing to expand, and what that means for Taiwan.
“It is similar to what happened in the US in the 70s and 80s when manufacturing jobs were being shifted away from the States into other countries. Many local jobs were lost and cities bankrupted,” he said.
CNN has asked TSMC for comment about its expansion plans.
Its CEO, CC Wei, had previously said: “Every region is important to TSMC,” adding that it would “continue to serve all the customers all over the world.”
Founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, TSMC is not a household name outside Taiwan, even though it produces an estimated 90% of the world’s super-advanced computer chips.
Semiconductors are an indispensable part of just about every electronic device. They are difficult to make because of the high cost of development and the level of knowledge required, meaning much of the production is concentrated among a handful of suppliers.
Concerned about losing access to crucial chips, particularly as tension has escalated between China and the United States, as well as between Beijing and Taipei, governments and major consumer-facing companies like Apple have asked semiconductor companies to localize their operations, according to experts.
“TSMC’s decision to expand its Arizona investment is evidence that politics and geopolitical risks will play a bigger role than previously in supply chain decisions,” said Chris Miller, author of “Chip War: the Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”.
“It also suggests that TSMC’s customers are asking for more geographic diversification, which is something that wasn’t previously a key concern of major customers.”
On Tuesday, TSMC said it was increasing its investment in the US by building a second semiconductor factory in Arizona and raising its total investment there from $12 billion to $40 billion.
Chang had previously said its plant in Arizona would produce 3-nanometer chips, the company’s most advanced technology, as advances in chip manufacturing require etching ever-smaller transistors onto silicon wafers.
These announcements alarm politicians like Chiu of the Taiwan People’s Party’s. He frets about the island losing out as TSMC is courted globally.
Chen of CL Securities said national security concerns among governments globally are driving TSMC’s expansion. But he believes the company will continue to manufacture its most advanced technology at home.
“This would make economic sense given [the] lower salaries [and] higher quality of Taiwanese engineers,” he said, adding that the company needs the approval of the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs to move its most advanced technologies abroad, which it was unlikely to give.
Many experts believe that by the time 3-nanometer chips are being made in Arizona, TSMC’s Taiwan operations would be producing even smaller, more advanced chips.
Hutcheson also believes TSMC will keep its most cutting-edge development teams in Taiwan.
“Once you have a team of people doing development work, they work very closely together. You don’t want to disrupt that. It’s not an easy thing to do,” he said.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as a political independent, she told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an exclusive TV interview.
“I’ve registered as an Arizona independent. I know some people might be a little bit surprised by this, but actually, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Sinema said in a Thursday interview with Tapper in her Senate office.
“I’ve never fit neatly into any party box. I’ve never really tried. I don’t want to,” she added. “Removing myself from the partisan structure – not only is it true to who I am and how I operate, I also think it’ll provide a place of belonging for many folks across the state and the country, who also are tired of the partisanship.”
Sinema’s move away from the Democratic Party is unlikely to change the power balance in the next Senate. Democrats will have a narrow 51-49 majority that includes two independents who caucus with them: Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.
While Sanders and King formally caucus with Democrats, Sinema declined to explicitly say that she would do the same. She did note, however, that she expects to keep her committee assignments – a signal that she doesn’t plan to upend the Senate composition, since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer controls committee rosters for Democrats.
“When I come to work each day, it’ll be the same,” Sinema said. “I’m going to still come to work and hopefully serve on the same committees I’ve been serving on and continue to work well with my colleagues at both political parties.”
But Sinema’s decision to become a political independent makes official what’s long been an independent streak for the Arizona senator, who began her political career as a member of the Green Party before being elected as a Democrat to the US House in 2012 and US Senate in 2018. Sinema has prided herself on being a thorn in the side of Democratic leaders, and her new nonpartisan affiliation will further free her to embrace an against-the-grain status in the Senate, though it raises new questions about how she – and Senate Democrats – will approach her reelection in 2024 with liberals already mulling a challenge.
Sinema wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic released Friday explaining her decision, noting that her approach in the Senate has “upset partisans in both parties.”
“When politicians are more focused on denying the opposition party a victory than they are on improving Americans’ lives, the people who lose are everyday Americans,” Sinema wrote.
“That’s why I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington.”
Sinema is up for reelection in 2024 and liberals in Arizona are already floating potential challengers, including Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who said earlier this year that some Democratic senators have urged him to run against Sinema.
“Unfortunately, Senator Sinema is once again putting her own interests ahead of getting things done for Arizonans,” Gallego said in a statement following Sinema’s announcement.
Sinema declined to address questions about her reelection bid in the interview with Tapper, saying that simply isn’t her focus right now.
She also brushed aside criticism she may face for the decision to leave the Democratic Party.
“I’m just not worried about folks who may not like this approach,” Sinema said. “What I am worried about is continuing to do what’s right for my state. And there are folks who certainly don’t like my approach, we hear about it a lot. But the proof is in the pudding.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Sinema a “key partner” following her decision and said the White House has “every reason to expect that we will continue to work successfully with her.”
Sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that Sinema gave the White House a heads up that she was leaving the Democratic Party. Schumer said in a statement he also was aware of Sinema’s bombshell announcement ahead of Friday morning.
“She asked me to keep her committee assignments and I agreed,” Schumer said. “Kyrsten is independent; that’s how she’s always been. I believe she’s a good and effective Senator and am looking forward to a productive session in the new Democratic majority Senate.”
Schumer also outlined how he did not expect Sinema’s decision to impact Democrats’ plans for next year, saying in his statement, “We will maintain our new majority on committees, exercise our subpoena power, and be able to clear nominees without discharge votes.”
The Biden White House is offering a muted reaction Friday morning and insisting that they expect to continue having a productive working relationship with the senator.
One White House official tells CNN that the move “doesn’t change much” other than Sinema’s own reelection calculations.
“We’ve worked with her effectively on a lot of major legislation from CHIPS to the bipartisan infrastructure law,” the official said. The White House, for now, has “every reason to expect that will continue,” they added.
Sinema has long been the source of a complex convergence of possibility, frustration and confusion inside the White House.
“Rubik’s cube, I guess?” was how one former senior White House official described the Arizona senator who has played a central role in President Joe Biden’s largest legislative wins and also some of his biggest agenda disappointments.
There was no major push to get Sinema to change her mind, a White House official said, noting that it wouldn’t have made a difference.
“Nothing about the last two years indicates a major effort would’ve made helped – the exact opposite actually,” a White House official said.
The most urgent near-term effort was to quietly find out what it meant for their newly expanded Senate majority, officials said.
While there were still clear details to figure out about process, “I think people exhaled when we had a better understanding of what she meant,” one source familiar with the discussion said.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota told “CNN This Morning” that “Senator Sinema has always had an independent streak,” adding that “I don’t believe this is going to shake things up quite like everyone thinks.”
She added, “Senator Sinema has been an independent in all intents and purposes.”
Sinema and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin have infuriated liberals at various points over the past two years, standing in the way of Biden’s agenda at a time when Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House.
Sinema and Manchin used their sway in the current 50-50 Senate – where any single Democrat could derail a bill – to influence a host of legislation, especially the massive $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill that Biden proposed last year. Sinema’s objections to increasing the corporate tax rate during the initial round of negotiations over the legislation last year particularly rankled liberals.
While Sinema was blindsided by the surprise deal that Manchin cut with Schumer in July on major health care and energy legislation, she ultimately backed the smaller spending package that Biden signed into law before the election.
Both Manchin and Sinema also opposed changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules despite pressure from their Senate colleagues and Biden to change them. After a vote against filibuster changes in January, the Arizona Democratic Party’s executive board censured Sinema.
Sinema has been in the middle of several significant bipartisan bills that were passed since Biden took office. She pointed to that record as evidence that her approach has been an effective one.
“I’ve been honored to lead historic efforts, from infrastructure, to gun violence prevention, to protecting religious liberty and helping LGBT families feel secure, to the CHIPs and science bill to the work we’ve done on veterans’ issues,” she told CNN. “The list is really long. And so I think that the results speak for themselves. It’s OK if some people aren’t comfortable with that approach.”
Sinema’s announcement comes just days after Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock won reelection in Georgia, securing Democrats a 51st Senate seat that frees them from reliance on Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote.
Sinema declined to address questions about whether she would support Biden for president in 2024, and she also said she’s not thinking about whether a strong third party should emerge in the US.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s switch from Democrat to independent won’t change much in the Senate, but it has significant implications for 2024.
Sinema will continue voting with Democrats most of the time. She’ll maintain her chairmanship of two subcommittees, both of which are standard assignments for a first-term senator. Republicans are no closer to having a majority in 2023 than they were at 5:59 a.m. Eastern time Friday morning, before stories announcing her decision went live on CNN and Politico.
“The reality is, not much has changed. I’m going to keep doing what I do,” Sinema told Arizona Morning News, claiming she had never attended Democratic Party caucus meetings or lunches.
Other Democrats agreed. “Senator Sinema has been an independent for all intents and purposes,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said on CNN shortly after the news broke.
But the GOP might be a bit closer to a majority following the 2024 elections. Sinema’s decision makes an already brutal 2024 Senate map even more excruciating for Democrats, who now face decisions about how to handle a senator who tanked major pieces of President Joe Biden’s agenda but was critical to rescuing other parts.
Sinema insisted her party switch had little to do with politics ― she has not even announced whether she will run for reelection in 2024. But the implications are obvious, even if the ultimate impact might remain unclear until Election Day two years from now.
As a Democratic incumbent, Sinema would have been guaranteed the protection of the well-funded, well-oiled political apparatus controlled by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC, which combined to raise more than a half-billion dollars in the 2022 cycle, would have spent on her behalf in a competitive general election and likely in a primary as well.
Senate Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment on Sinema’s party switch, and Senate Democrats have not yet selected a chair for next cycle’s DSCC.
But those two groups typically don’t support any Democratic challenge to the other independents who align with the caucus, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Maine Sen. Angus King. While both break with other Democrats on occasion ― King played a major role in blocking Biden’s first nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, for instance ― neither aggravates the party nearly as much as Sinema. Both are also long-time political leaders in their home state, meaning any challenge is doomed anyway.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, recently helped pass a bill protecting marriage rights.
Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Sinema, for all her aspirations of recreating the coalition that backed the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is not yet a hometown hero on that level. The most recent polling judging her popularity, an AARP survey conducted by a bipartisan duo of pollsters in October, found just 37% of Arizona voters had a favorable opinion of her and 54% had a negative opinion.
Sinema’s numbers were matched only by Blake Masters, the Republican venture capitalist who lost to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in November. Kelly, Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs (D), GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Biden and former President Donald Trump were all more popular than Sinema with Arizona voters.
Switching parties allows Sinema to avoid a brutal primary challenge, or at least make one much more difficult to pull off. If another Democrat decided to jump into the race, they could risk splitting the vote in the general election and handing Republicans the seat in 2024.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who likely would have run a primary campaign against Sinema, now faces the conundrum of becoming a spoiler candidate if he decides to go through with it. National Democrats will also have to choose whether to back Sinema and discourage other candidates from running against her.
In a statement Friday morning, Gallego did not sound inclined to back down.
“We need senators who will put Arizonans ahead of big drug companies and Wall Street donors,” he said. “Whether in the Marine Corps or in Congress, I have never backed down from fighting for Arizonans.”
Gallego said Sinema’s party switch was another example of her “putting her own interests ahead of Arizona’s.”
Functionally, Sinema’s announcement will have little to no impact in the Senate. While her desk is located on the Democratic side of the Senate floor, she spends most of her time on the Republican side, where she is friendly with many GOP senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). She rarely attends Democratic caucus meetings, generally avoids partisan messaging events and only endorsed Hobbs a few weeks before this year’s election.
Sinema has been a key bipartisan dealmaker in the past two years, helping negotiate and steer through several notable bills into law. Most recently, she helped win over 12 Republican yes votes for legislation codifying protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. She also successfully pushed for major infrastructure and gun law reforms.
Progressives, who largely lined up behind her Senate bid in 2018, have found much to complain about her time in the Senate, however. She opposed eliminating the filibuster, including to pass voting rights legislation. And she helped block major progressive priorities, including a $15 minimum wage and efforts to close a tax loophole benefiting rich investors.
And the party’s left flank, emboldened by statewide victories in a GOP-leaning midterm year, is very explicitly not behind her ahead of 2024. Primary Sinema, a group formed in 2021 to back a prospective challenger, said its goal of defeating her remains unchanged.
“Today, Kyrsten Sinema told us what we’ve already known for years: she’s not a Democrat, and she’s simply out for herself,” the group said in a statement. “For the last year, we’ve been laying the groundwork to defeat Kyrsten Sinema because Arizonans deserve a Senator who cares about them, and not special interests. In one way, Sinema just made our jobs easier by bowing out of a Democratic primary she knew she couldn’t win. Now, we’ll beat her in the general election with a real Democrat.”
Populations of a vulnerable species of marine mammal, numerous species of abalone and a type of Caribbean coral are now threatened with extinction, an international conservation organization said Friday.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature announced the update during the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP15, conference in Montreal. The union’s hundreds of members include government agencies from around the world, and it’s one of the planet’s widest-reaching environmental networks.
The IUCN uses its Red List of Threatened Species to categorize animals approaching extinction. This year, the union is sounding the alarm about the dugong — a large and docile marine mammal that lives from the eastern coast of Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.
The dugong is vulnerable throughout its range, and now populations in East Africa have entered the red list as critically endangered, IUCN said in a statement. Populations in New Caledonia have entered the list as endangered, the group said.
The major threats to the animal are unintentional capture in fishing gear in East Africa and poaching in New Caledonia, IUCN said. It also suffers from boat collisions and loss of the seagrasses it eats, said Evan Trotzuk, who led the East Africa red list assessment.
“Strengthening community-led fisheries governance and expanding work opportunities beyond fishing are key in East Africa, where marine ecosystems are fundamental to people’s food security and livelihoods,” Trotzuk said.
The IUCN Red List includes more than 150,000 species. The list sometimes overlaps with the species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, such as in the case of the North Atlantic right whale. More than 42,000 of the species on the red list are threatened with extinction, IUCN says.
IUCN typically updates the red list two or three times a year. This week’s update includes more than 3,000 additions to the red list.
IUCN uses several categories to describe an animal’s status, ranging from “least concern” to “critically endangered.” Pillar coral, which is found throughout the Caribbean, was moved from vulnerable to critically endangered in this week’s update.
The coral is threatened by a tissue loss disease, and its population has shrunk by more than 80% across most of its range since 1990, IUCN said. The IUCN lists more than two dozen corals in the Atlantic Ocean as critically endangered.
Almost half the corals in the Atlantic are “at elevated risk of extinction due to climate change and other impacts,” Beth Polidoro, an associate professor at Arizona State University and red list coordinator for IUCN.
Unsustainable harvesting and poaching have emerged as threats to abalone, which are used as seafood, IUCN said. Twenty of the 54 abalone species in the world are threatened with extinction according to the red list’s first global assessment of the species.
Threats to the abalone are compounded by climate change, diseases and pollution, the organization said.
“This red list update brings to light new evidence of the multiple interacting threats to declining life in the sea,” said Jon Paul Rodríguez, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.
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Follow Patrick Whittle on Twitter: @pxwhittle
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LAS VEGAS — Outgoing NCAA President Mark Emmert had some advice for his replacement in his first public appearance since announcing in April he was stepping down from position he has held for the last 12 years.
“The job requires a lot of patience. And it requires a lot of tolerance for ambiguity and it’s got a lot of moving parts because of the scale of the enterprise,” Emmert said Wednesday during an appearance at the Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum. “But that just means you got to stay as focused as you can on what really counts. And that’s doing the right thing by the athletes.”
Emmert, 69, has kept a low-profile during this lame-duck period as the NCAA’s leader. His tenure is set to end officially June 30, but the search for his successor is expected to be completed by the NCAA convention the second week of January.
He will leave the association, which has more than 1,100 member schools that serve half a million college athletes, as it is in the process of a sweeping reorganization and attempt to decentralize the regulation of college athletics.
Major college sports is making an awkward transition into a new era where athletes can be paid endorsers, while enforcement of rules regarding name, image and likeness has been flimsy. The games have never been more valuable media content, but the NCAA is still fighting to keep from paying the athletes like employees.
Emmert has led the NCAA through a tumultuous time when it has been battered by antitrust lawsuits and threatened by politicians. Last year’s unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court left the NCAA exposed to further legal attacks and pivoting to deregulation.
“Mark walked … in at one of — if not the most challenging time for intercollegiate athletics and has continued to lead well,” Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey said. “I think you have to take a step back and look at how the NCAA is continuing to function as a priority and how it’s continuing to adapt, and you can make plenty of observations: ‘Well, it hasn’t done this. It hasn’t done that.’ That true in any endeavor.”
Despite all the uncertainty, Emmert said leading the NCAA is still a desirable opportunity.
“I guess I’ll confess to a little bit of envy to whoever winds up stepping in next because they get to continue to shape that amazing American institution,” he said.
Emmert called college sports a “public trust” and he conceded the job was even bigger than he thought it would be when took over in 2010. Emmert had previously served as the president at the University of Washington and LSU.
Even with that experience in higher education, Emmert admitted the governance of college sports — a representative democracy with limited power for the person sitting at the top — was complicated.
Chris Howard, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Arizona State, called Emmert “a good leader” who had a challenging role.
“It’s a different type of leadership that’s much different than that stern hand that we think we associate with leadership,” said Howard, a former college football player at Air Force who previously was president at Robert Morris University.
Emmert has faced plenty of criticism as he became the face of an increasing unpopular entity.
“I think it’s in a lot of ways inappropriate to have an administrator be the face of the NCAA,” Emmert said. “The athletes are the face of the NCAA.”
Emmert, who made $2.9 million in 2021, said the only time the criticism bothered him was when he was accused of not caring about the athletes and prioritizing generating revenue.
“That’s painful. It’s offensive. It means somebody’s not spent two minutes trying to figure out, you know, who this guy is and what he’s done all his life,” he said.
Emmert said it was fair to say the NCAA should have acted sooner on name, image and likeness, but the association’s ability to create guidelines was overrun by state laws and other challenges.
“And the legal environment right now really constrains any national entity from saying, ‘Yeah, here’s how we’re going to manage this and control it,’” he said.
He called — again — for Congress to create federal NIL legislation.
Emmert said he didn’t regret going outside the the NCAA’s normal enforcement process to punish Penn State’s football program in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse case in 2014.
The NCAA was sued for the penalties and sanctions against Penn State and eventually many of them were rolled back.
“In retrospect, it would have been useful to do that a little more slowly, probably. And maybe some of the anxiety would have died down but I don’t second guess that one as much as people think,” Emmert said.
Emmert said he has played no role in choosing the next NCAA president beyond helping the Board of Governors create a job description.
“I’ve just loved 12 years of working in this space. I think college sports is one of the most consequential things that goes on in the country,” Emmert said. “And I hope people always recognize that we’re talking about changing a half a million people’s lives on an annual basis. There’s very few enterprises that do that.”
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Follow Ralph D. Russo at https://twitter.com/ralphDrussoAP and listen at http://www.appodcasts.com
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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football and https://twitter.com/ap—top25. Sign up for the AP’s college football newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/mrxhe6f2
Federal authorities on Wednesday charged three of a self-declared prophet’s wives with kidnapping and impeding a foreseeable prosecution after eight girls associated with the polygamous group fled from state foster care.
Naomi Bistline and Donnae Barlow appeared in federal magistrate court in Flagstaff on Wednesday. They remain jailed and have court hearings scheduled next week. Moretta Rose Johnson is awaiting extradition from Washington state.
Samuel Bateman, the leader of the small polygamous group on the Arizona-Utah border, had taken at least 20 wives, most of them minors, and punished followers who did not treat him as a prophet, newly filed federal court documents show.
Naomi Bistline arrives at the federal courthouse in Flagstaff, Ariz., on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022.
Jake Bacon / AP
The filing provides insight into what investigators have found in a case that first became public in August.
The FBI affidavit filed in the women’s case centers on Bateman, who proclaimed himself a prophet in 2019. Authorities wrote that Bateman orchestrated sexual acts involving minors and gave wives as gifts to his male followers, claiming to do so on orders from the “Heavenly Father.” The men supported Bateman financially and gave him their own wives and young daughters as wives.
Bateman, 46, has pleaded not guilty to state child abuse charges and federal charges of tampering with evidence. A trial on the federal charges is scheduled for January. He remains imprisoned in Arizona.
Bateman was a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, until he left in recent years and started his own small offshoot group, said Sam Brower, who has spent years investigating the group. Bateman was once among the trusted followers of imprisoned leader Warren Jeffs, but Jeffs denounced Bateman in a written revelation sent to his followers from prison, Brower said.
Jeffs is serving a life sentence in Texas for child sex abuse related to underage marriages.
Samuel Rappylee Bateman was booked into jail in September 2022 on three counts of child abuse.
Coconino County Sheriff’s Office
The FLDS is itself a breakaway sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church. Polygamy is a legacy of the early teachings of the mainstream church, but it abandoned the practice in 1890 and now strictly prohibits it.
Federal officials contend Bateman engaged in horrific acts with children and called upon his followers to help cover his tracks. His followers say federal officials have falsely accused him and claim something else is at play.
Barlow’s sister, Alice Barlow, said the community is supportive, children are happy and wives consider each other sisters. She said Bateman is a “sweet, gentle spirit,” who teaches that forgiveness and repentance are within reach.
“What they’re trying to do is annihilate a religion,” she told The Associated Press following Wednesday’s hearing. “Samuel is a prophet and a savior in this world. He hasn’t done wrong. They’ve got to realize that God will defend his prophet.”
According to the FBI affidavit, Bateman demanded that his followers confess publicly for any indiscretions, and shared those confessions widely. He claimed the punishments, which ranged from a time out to public shaming and sexual activity, came from the Lord, the affidavit states. Bateman lived in Colorado City, a community that straddles the border between Arizona and Utah, among a patchwork of devout members of the polygamous FLDS, ex-FLDS members and those who don’t practice the beliefs. Bateman and his followers believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.
He once tried to take his only daughter as a wife, but she told her mother about her father’s plan and the mother and daughter moved out and got a restraining order against Bateman. The mother was Bateman’s only wife in 2019, before Bateman started taking more wives.
Bateman was first arrested in August when someone spotted small fingers in the gap of a trailer he was hauling through Flagstaff. Police found three girls, between 11 and 14, in a makeshift room in the unventilated trailer.
The girls told authorities they didn’t have any health or medical needs, according to an Arizona Department of Public Safety report.
Bateman posted bond but was arrested again in September and charged with obstructing justice in a federal investigation into whether children were being transported across state lines for sexual activity. Authorities said that following his first arrest he instructed his followers to obtain passports and to delete messages sent through an encrypted messaging app.
“Bateman did so in order to obstruct, influence, and impede an investigation and prosecution in federal court,” federal prosecutors said when announcing the indictment in September. He was charged with destruction of records or an attempt to destroy records in an official proceeding; tampering or attempting to tamper with an official proceeding; and destruction of records in a federal investigation.
Alice Barlow said the family already was planning to get passports for a family trip to Mexico, not to evade authorities.
At the time of the September arrest, authorities removed nine children from Bateman’s home in Colorado City and placed them in foster care.
None of the girls, identified by their initials in court documents, disclosed sexual abuse by Bateman during forensic interviews, though one said she was present during sexual activity, according to the FBI affidavit. But several of the girls wrote in journals that were seized by the FBI about intimate interactions with Bateman. Authorities believe the older girls influenced the younger ones not to talk about Bateman, the FBI said.
Eight of the children later escaped from foster care, and the FBI alleged Bistline, Barlow and Johnson – all relatives of the children as well as Bateman’s current or former wives – played a part in getting them out of Arizona. The girls were found last week, hundreds of miles away in Spokane, Washington, in a vehicle that Johnson was driving, the FBI affidavit said.
In court Wednesday, Barlow’s attorney said her client was only doing what she believed was right. The attorney, Roberta McVickers, added that Barlow would follow whatever orders the court issues.
Donnae Barlow arrives at the federal courthouse in Flagstaff, Ariz., on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022.
Jake Bacon / AP
Barlow has lived in Colorado City much of her life and has a 2-year-old with special needs, McVickers said in arguing for her to be released from custody. Barlow was educated at home through the 7th grade, and has no independent source of income and no criminal history, McVickers said.
“It’s an adjustment for her to learn whose rules to follow,” McVickers said.
Prosecutor Wayne Venhuizen noted Bistline and Barlow were communicating with Bateman about the children.
“These women have proven that they will stop at nothing to interfere with a federal investigation and protect Bateman, who was sexually abusing children,” he said.
Ultimately, the federal judge overseeing the case ordered Barlow and Bistline, whose brief hearing focused on setting further court dates, to remain in custody.
Barlow, Bistline and Johnson face life in prison if convicted of the charges. Johnson does not yet have an attorney publicly listed in Arizona.
FBI spokesperson Kevin Smith declined Tuesday to discuss the trajectory of the case against the women and Bateman. Court records allege Bateman, 46, engaged in child sex trafficking and polygamy, but none of his current charges relate to those allegations. Bateman’s attorney in the federal case, Adam Zickerman, did not respond to requests for comment.
Criminal defense attorney Michael Piccarreta, who represented Warren Jeffs on Arizona charges that were dismissed and is not involved in the current cases, said Arizona has a history of trying to take a stand against polygamy by charging relatively minor offenses to build bigger cases.
“Whether this is the same tactic that has been used in the past or whether there’s more to the story, only time will tell,” he said.
Polygamy is a felony in Arizona but in Utah it is only a misdemeanor, after a change in 2020 ended jail time for polygamy between consenting adults. Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for the proposal, which supporters said will allow the 30,000 or so people living in the state’s polygamous communities to come out of the shadows and report abuses such as underage marriage by other polygamists without fear of prosecution.
Arizona Department of Child Services spokesperson Darren DaRonco declined to comment on the status of the nine children in state custody.
Alice Barlow has two teenage daughters in state custody, one of whom ran away from the group home. She says she hasn’t been allowed to see or communicate with them lately.
Three girls embrace before they are removed from the home of Samuel Bateman, following his arrest in Colorado City, Ariz., on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. Seven were removed from the Bateman home, as well as two others from another house as part of the investigation.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The leader of a small polygamous group on the Arizona-Utah border had taken at least 20 wives, most of them minors, and punished followers who did not treat him as a prophet, newly filed federal court documents show.
The filing provides insight into what investigators have found in a case that first became public in August. It came as federal authorities charged three of the self-declared prophet’s wives with kidnapping and impeding a foreseeable prosecution after eight girls associated with the group fled from state foster care.
Naomi Bistline and Donnae Barlow appeared in federal magistrate court in Flagstaff on Wednesday. They remain jailed and have court hearings scheduled next week. Moretta Rose Johnson is awaiting extradition from Washington state.
The FBI affidavit filed in the women’s case centers on Samuel Bateman, who proclaimed himself a prophet in 2019. Authorities wrote that Bateman orchestrated sexual acts involving minors and gave wives as gifts to his male followers, claiming to do so on orders from the “Heavenly Father.” The men supported Bateman financially and gave him their own wives and young daughters as wives.
Bateman, 46, has pleaded not guilty to state child abuse charges and federal charges of tampering with evidence. A trial on the federal charges is scheduled for January. He remains imprisoned in Arizona.
Bateman was a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, until he left in recent years and started his own small offshoot group, said Sam Brower, who has spent years investigating the group. Bateman was once among the trusted followers of imprisoned leader Warren Jeffs, but Jeffs denounced Bateman in a written revelation sent to his followers from prison, Brower said.
Jeffs is serving a life sentence in Texas for child sex abuse related to underage marriages.
The FLDS is itself a breakaway sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church. Polygamy is a legacy of the early teachings of the mainstream church, but it abandoned the practice in 1890 and now strictly prohibits it.
Federal officials contend Bateman engaged in horrific acts with children and called upon his followers to help cover his tracks. His followers say federal officials have falsely accused him and claim something else is at play.
Barlow’s sister, Alice Barlow, said the community is supportive, children are happy and wives consider each other sisters. She said Bateman is a “sweet, gentle spirit,” who teaches that forgiveness and repentance are within reach.
“What they’re trying to do is annihilate a religion,” she told The Associated Press following Wednesday’s hearing. “Samuel is a prophet and a savior in this world. He hasn’t done wrong. They’ve got to realize that God will defend his prophet.”
According to the FBI affidavit, Bateman demanded that his followers confess publicly for any indiscretions, and shared those confessions widely. He claimed the punishments, which ranged from a time out to public shaming and sexual activity, came from the Lord, the affidavit states. Bateman lived in Colorado City, a community that straddles the border between Arizona and Utah, among a patchwork of devout members of the polygamous FLDS, ex-FLDS members and those who don’t practice the beliefs. Bateman and his followers believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.
He once tried to take his only daughter as a wife, but she told her mother about her father’s plan and the mother and daughter moved out and got a restraining order against Bateman. The mother was Bateman’s only wife in 2019, before Bateman started taking more wives.
Bateman was first arrested in August when someone spotted small fingers in the gap of a trailer he was hauling through Flagstaff. Police found three girls, between 11 and 14, in a makeshift room in the unventilated trailer.
The girls told authorities they didn’t have any health or medical needs, according to an Arizona Department of Public Safety report.
Bateman posted bond but was arrested again in September and charged with obstructing justice in a federal investigation into whether children were being transported across state lines for sexual activity. Authorities said that following his first arrest he instructed his followers to obtain passports and to delete messages sent through an encrypted messaging app.
Alice Barlow said the family already was planning to get passports for a family trip to Mexico, not to evade authorities.
At the time of the September arrest, authorities removed nine children from Bateman’s home in Colorado City and placed them in foster care.
None of the girls, identified by their initials in court documents, disclosed sexual abuse by Bateman during forensic interviews, though one said she was present during sexual activity, according to the FBI affidavit. But several of the girls wrote in journals that were seized by the FBI about intimate interactions with Bateman. Authorities believe the older girls influenced the younger ones not to talk about Bateman, the FBI said.
Eight of the children later escaped from foster care, and the FBI alleged Bistline, Barlow and Johnson — all relatives of the children as well as Bateman’s current or former wives — played a part in getting them out of Arizona. The girls were found last week, hundreds of miles away in Spokane, Washington, in a vehicle that Johnson was driving, the FBI affidavit said.
In court Wednesday, Barlow’s attorney said her client was only doing what she believed was right. The attorney, Roberta McVickers, added that Barlow would follow whatever orders the court issues.
Barlow has lived in Colorado City much of her life and has a 2-year-old with special needs, McVickers said in arguing for her to be released from custody. Barlow was educated at home through the 7th grade, and has no independent source of income and no criminal history, McVickers said.
“It’s an adjustment for her to learn whose rules to follow,” McVickers said.
Prosecutor Wayne Venhuizen noted Bistline and Barlow were communicating with Bateman about the children.
“These women have proven that they will stop at nothing to interfere with a federal investigation and protect Bateman, who was sexually abusing children,” he said.
Ultimately, the federal judge overseeing the case ordered Barlow and Bistline, whose brief hearing focused on setting further court dates, to remain in custody.
Barlow, Bistline and Johnson face life in prison if convicted of the charges. Johnson does not yet have an attorney publicly listed in Arizona.
FBI spokesperson Kevin Smith declined Tuesday to discuss the trajectory of the case against the women and Bateman. Court records allege Bateman, 46, engaged in child sex trafficking and polygamy, but none of his current charges relate to those allegations. Bateman’s attorney in the federal case, Adam Zickerman, did not respond to requests for comment.
Criminal defense attorney Michael Piccarreta, who represented Warren Jeffs on Arizona charges that were dismissed and is not involved in the current cases, said Arizona has a history of trying to take a stand against polygamy by charging relatively minor offenses to build bigger cases.
“Whether this is the same tactic that has been used in the past or whether there’s more to the story, only time will tell,” he said.
Polygamy is a felony in Arizona but in Utah it is only a misdemeanor, after a change in 2020 ended jail time for polygamy between consenting adults. Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for the proposal, which supporters said will allow the 30,000 or so people living in the state’s polygamous communities to come out of the shadows and report abuses such as underage marriage by other polygamists without fear of prosecution.
Arizona Department of Child Services spokesperson Darren DaRonco declined to comment on the status of the nine children in state custody.
Alice Barlow has two teenage daughters in state custody, one of whom ran away from the group home. She says she hasn’t been allowed to see or communicate with them lately.
———
Associated Press writer Sam Metz in Salt Lake City contributed to this story.
PHOENIX, December 7, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– With holidays just around the corner, many families are gathering or visiting senior relatives, creating the perfect opportunity to check on the well-being of aging seniors. Travel has been limited the past few years for many families, so some signs that your aging loved ones may need in-home care may have gone unnoticed.
Sara Wilson, CEO of Home Assist Health, a Phoenix-based nonprofit that serves 1,200 seniors and individuals with disabilities in their homes annually, notes, “Seniors often don’t want to ask for help because they are afraid of being put in a long-term care home or being moved from where they are most comfortable, their homes. The good news, many families don’t realize seniors can stay in their own home and have help come to them.”
Wilson shares that if you visit senior family members this holiday season and notice the following, it may be time to have a conversation about home care:
10 Signs Your Senior Relative May Need In-Home Care
Not keeping up with house cleaning/yard work
Missing appointments or meetings/obligations
Poor personal hygiene or bladder control issues
Difficulty with mobility or standing
Car accident or difficulty driving
Depression, seclusion or changes in mood
Loss of interest in activities they used to enjoy
Multiple chronic illnesses they are trying to manage, like diabetes or high blood pressure
Gained or lost a significant amount of weight; trouble chewing, swallowing or taking medication
Recent fall
Next Steps for Care
If concerned, consider taking the next step by contacting organizations like Home Assist Health that provide free phone interviews and in-home evaluations. Determine if a loved one has insurance for home care, which may come from a Medicaid Long-Term Care benefit, Select Medicare Advantage Plans, or Private Long-Term Care Insurance Plan. For those without home care benefits from insurance, there are other payment methods for accessing care at home. Visit https://homeassisthealth.org to learn more.
About Home Assist Health
Home Assist Health, a nonprofit organization based in Phoenix, offers personalized home- and community-based services to seniors and individuals with disabilities. Services include personal care assistance, companionship, housekeeping, respite care and habilitation. Specialty services include enhanced care transitions and enhanced chronic disease management. Home Assist Health puts compassion into action, supporting Arizonans in building and maintaining their independence, community involvement and overall life quality while remaining in the comforts of their own home. More info: https://homeassisthealth.org or follow them on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is upping its investment in the United States, announcing Tuesday that it’s building a second semiconductor factory in Arizona and raising its investment there from $12 billion to $40 billion.
TSMC’s plans come as tensions between Washington and Beijing are rising over chips, with President Joe Biden imposing a sweeping set of controls on the sale of advanced chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese firms.
Biden visited the manufacturer’s site in Phoenix and spoke about bringing jobs and investment to Arizona, calling TSMC’s $40 billion commitment “the largest foreign investment in the history of this state.” Other lawmakers and business leaders also attended the event, including Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“American manufacturing is back, folks,” Biden said at the event. “These are the most advanced semiconductor chips on the planet, chips that will power iPhones and MacBooks, as Tim Cook can attest … It could be a game changer.”
In his remarks, Cook said: “As many of you know, we work with TSMC to manufacture the chips that help power our products all over the world, and we look forward to expanding this work in the years to come as TSMC forms new and deeper roots in America.” He added that with the opening of the new facility, Apple’s own Silicon chips “can be proudly stamped ‘Made in America.’”
TSMC previously announced that it was building a $12 billion facility in Arizona that will eventually manufacture 3-nanometer chips, TSMC’s most advanced technology. Between the two factories, thousands of “high-paying high-tech jobs” will be added to the state and 600,000 wafers per year will be produced, the company said.
TSMC accounts for an estimated 90% of the world’s super-advanced computer chips, supplying tech giants including Apple
(AAPL) and Qualcomm
(QCOM).
Chips are an indispensable part of everything from smartphones to washing machines — but are also difficult to make because of the high cost of development and the level of knowledge required, meaning much of the production is concentrated among a handful of suppliers.
The White House is touting the new investments as a direct result of Biden’s economic plan, including the $200 billion CHIPS and Science Act. Biden has been visiting communities where companies like TSMC and Intel have announced new investments since the passage of the law this summer.
“It means more workers in these major factories, but it also means more opportunities for suppliers and contractors, good paying construction jobs, opportunities for small and medium sized manufacturers and suppliers,” National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told reporters in a call on Monday. “It means economic opportunity for communities that have often been left behind in economic cycles, including traditional energy communities that have powered our nation for generations and tribal nations.”
The global chip shortage first surfaced at the beginning of the pandemic, which upended supply chains and changed consumer shopping patterns. Automakers cut back on their orders for chips while tech companies, whose products were boosted by lockdown living, snapped up as many as they could.
The facility Biden will visit Tuesday in Phoenix is slated to begin producing chips in 2024. The new facility should start production in 2026.
– CNN’s Nikki Carvajal, Wayne Chang, Clare Duffy and Diksha Madhok contributed to this report.
On the day Arizona certified its midterm election results, almost a month after Election Day. Arizona Assistant Secretary of State Allie Bones joins “Red and Blue” to discuss what challenges may still come, why election denialism is so prevalent in the state and more.
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As millions of Americans returned to their jobs this week after the Thanksgiving holiday, several of the elected leaders of Cochise County, Arizona, opted not to do theirs.
The board of supervisors in this sparsely populated southeastern chunk of the state refuses to certify the county’s midterm-election results. Of course, nothing actually went wrong in Cochise County’s election. Instead, on Monday, the two Republican members of the Cochise County board outvoted its single Democrat to delay certification of the election, missing the deadline. By refusing to complete the process, these two officials chose instead to make a kind of generalized protest against imagined election fraud in Arizona. Their action could mean that Cochise County voters won’t have their ballots counted in the state’s final results.
Nullifying the votes of some 47,000 people for no reason is certainly a choice—and a nihilistic one at that. These two board members are engaging in a strategy of bottom-up election obstruction, apparently to clog the gears of democracy with enough sand to spread distrust throughout the entire system. Nationally, the Cochise County supervisors’ strategy may prove inconsequential, at least for now. But it’s a perfect illustration of the state of American democracy—and could be a test run of much greater consequence for 2024.
Even though prominent election deniers lost big in the November polls, in both Arizona and elsewhere, the election-denial movement is still alive, and even thriving, at the state and local level around the country. The “Stop the Steal” blueprint that Donald Trump drew up is there for anyone to follow, in the next presidential cycle and quite possibly beyond.
Before the midterms, election experts had their eyes fixed on Arizona, and in particular on Cochise County, 200 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, in the home of the Dragoon Mountains and the old frontier boomtown of Tombstone, suspicion of voting machines runs deep—so much so that county officials were demanding a full hand recount of the votes before the election had even happened. (Although all Arizona postelection audits require a small hand-counted sample, a full hand count of the votes would be illegal and, experts say, extremely prone to error.) In the end, the Arizona Supreme Court had to prevent Cochise County officials from doing it.
Ultimately, Election Day went smoothly in Cochise, and Republicans cleaned house in the county’s results: The GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters defeated their Democratic opponents there by 18 and 11 points respectively, even though both lost overall. Still, county GOP leaders wouldn’t take yes for an answer, and they weren’t finished sowing chaos.
One of the Republican supervisors acknowledged in an interview that delaying the county’s election certification was in fact intended as a protest over the election—not in Cochise, but in Maricopa County, where Republicans claim, without evidence, that machine errors disenfranchised thousands of voters. In other words, the play here is to use local political control in one county to cast doubt on another’s larger and more politically important election—to taint the entire process by contaminating a small piece of it.
As I reported at the time, Maricopa County did have some technical problems on Election Day. Dozens of tabulation-machine printers weren’t working, despite those machines having been previously tested for accuracy. But voters weren’t turned away from polling sites. Instead, their ballots were dropped in an auxiliary box and taken to the county’s central tabulation center, to be counted along with millions of other ballots. If anyone was disenfranchising Arizonans, it was the state’s GOP leaders demanding that voters not put their ballot in the auxiliary box.
But all of that is truly beside the point. Certification is not just a formality; the process enables officials to review an election for wrongdoing. Which sometimes happens! Back in 2018, the North Carolina state election board refused to certify the results of a House race, because Republican campaign operatives had engaged in illegal ballot harvesting and tampering.
But nothing like that went down in Cochise or Maricopa Counties this year. Instead, local GOP officials are choosing to invalidate the votes of their own neighbors in order to express their displeasure with an election outcome. It’s childish. It’s wrong. It seems very illegal. And it’s probably not going to work. On Monday, Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit against the board, tweeting that Cochise County “had a statutory duty to certify the results of the 2022 General Election by today.” The judge will hear the suit later today, and may offer a decision as early as this afternoon.
The most likely outcome is that the judge forces the board to certify the election. “Stop the Steal” zealots have tried the Cochise move before, after all. Earlier this year, commissioners in heavily Republican Otero County, New Mexico, decided not to certify their party primary-election results. That didn’t fly at the state supreme court, which ruled that the commissioners had to do their jobs. (Commissioner Couy Griffin notably still voted no, announcing that his vote was “based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”) But if the court doesn’t force Cochise officials to change their ways, the secretary of state’s office could, in theory, tally the rest of Arizona’s votes without the county’s included. The irony is that, in a purely electoral sense, this would be great news for Democrats, potentially flipping a U.S. House seat from red to blue.
Something that became very clear in 2020 is that America’s election system relies not on spelled-out rules and regulations, but on human beings acting honestly. Before 2016, the certification process was not used as a weapon to fight back against a disappointing result. “That’s not how healthy democracies function,” Tammy Patrick, the program CEO for the election center at the National Association of Election Officials, told me. And American democracy is only as healthy as its weakest link.
What happens next in Cochise County may have little significant effect on the rest of the country. But Cochise serves as a reminder that the election-fraud myth persists. And in places where its believers have unchecked power, they will do their utmost to flex it.
The hope was that, after major midterm losses and continued rebukes from the courts, the election-denial movement would peter out—that Stop the Steal types might simply grow tired of failing. But if Trump is a viable candidate for president in 2024, you can expect him to sing from the same songbook he used in 2016 and 2020. Other candidates will amplify those lies, too, if they can benefit from doing so. Whether election denialism will survive independently of Trump is hard to anticipate. But Republicans “have seen that while it may not be the way to gain office, it is certainly the way to drive donations and fundraising and elevate your stature in the party,” Patrick said.
Cochise is a useful stress test for America’s electoral system “in terms of demonstrating the continued dangers to our democracy”—and what can be done about them, Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told me. Congress should pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act, Hasen said. States can also try to prevent what’s happening in Cochise County from recurring in 2024. Colorado passed legislation this year clarifying its rules about certification. But state leaders are similarly well positioned to make the waters of democracy muddier. In 2021, Arizona Republicans tried and failed to pass legislation that would allow the state legislature to reject the results of an election it didn’t support. An upcoming Supreme Court decision on the authority of state legislatures in administering elections will be incredibly consequential to any future election-subversion efforts.
Over the past six years, millions of people in this country have been encouraged by political leaders on the right to see themselves as the real Americans—the nation’s true rulers—who are in danger of being cheated out of their political inheritance by voter fraud on the left. They’ve been trained to respond to electoral losses with deflection, conspiracy, and dishonesty. They don’t need Trump around to keep doing that.
PHOENIX (AP) — Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused Monday to certify the 2022 election despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by the state’s top election official.
The refusal to certify by Cochise County in southeastern Arizona comes amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said is an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise County voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.
The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until Friday, when they want to hear once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.
State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time.
That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.
Hobbs’ lawsuit asks the Cochise County Superior Court to order officials to certify by Thursday. Failing to certify would undermine the will of the county’s voters “and sow further confusion and doubt about the integrity of Arizona’s election system,” lawyers for Hobbs wrote.
“The Board of Supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters,” Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, said in an email.
Arizona law requires county officials to approve the election canvass, and lawyers in several counties warned Republican supervisors they could face criminal charges for failing to carry out their obligations.
Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the country. That’s not been the case in Arizona, which was a focal point for efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud.
Officials in a northeastern Pennsylvania county where paper shortages caused Election Day ballot problems deadlocked Monday on whether to report official vote tallies to the state, effectively preventing their certification of the results.
Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest profile races over Republicans who aggressively promoted Trump’s 2020 election lies. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor who lost to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their losses.
They blame Republican election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, including metro Phoenix, for a problem with some ballot printers. Officials in Maricopa County said everyone had a chance to vote and all legal ballots were counted.
Navajo, a rural Republican-leaning county, and Coconino, which is staunchly Democratic, voted to certify on Monday. In conservative Mohave and Yavapai counties, supervisors voted to canvass the results despite their own misgivings and several dozen speakers urging them not to.
“Delaying this vote again will only prolong the agony without actually changing anything,” said Mohave County Supervisor Hildy Angius, a Republican. The county last week delayed its certification vote to register a protest against voting issues in Maricopa County.
In Cochise County, GOP supervisors abandoned plans to hand count all ballots, which a court said would be illegal, but demanded last week that the secretary of state prove vote-counting machines were legally certified before they would approve the election results. On Monday, they said they wanted to hear again about those concerns.
There are two companies that are accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct testing and certification of voting equipment, such as the electronic tabulators used in Arizona to read and count ballots.
Conspiracy theories surrounding this process surfaced in early 2021, focused on what appeared to be an outdated accreditation certificate for one of the companies that was posted online. Federal officials investigated and reported that an administrative error had resulted in the agency failing to reissue an updated certificate as the company remained in good standing and underwent audits in 2018 and in early 2021.
Officials also noted federal law dictates the only way a testing company can lose certification is for the commission to revoke it, which did not occur.
Lake has pointed to problems on Election Day in Maricopa County, where printers at some vote centers produced ballots with markings that were too light to be read by on-site tabulators. Lines backed up amid the confusion, and Lake says an unknown number of her supporters may have been dissuaded from voting as a result.
She filed a public records lawsuit last week, demanding the county produce documents shedding light on the issue before voting to certify the election on Monday. Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich also demanded an explanation ahead of the vote.
The county responded on Sunday, saying nobody was prevented from voting, and 85% of vote centers never had lines longer than 45 minutes. Most vote centers with long lines had others nearby with shorter waits, county officials said.
The response blamed prominent Republicans, including party chair Kelli Ward, for sowing confusion by telling supporters on Twitter not to place their ballots in a secure box to be tabulated later by more robust machines at county elections headquarters.
The county said that just under 17,000 Election Day ballots were placed in those secure boxes and all were counted. Officials also said the problem was distributed across the county, dispelling claims by Lake that it was concentrated in Republican areas. Election Day ballots went overwhelmingly for Republicans, though only 16% of the 1.56 million votes cast in Maricopa County were made in-person on Election Day.
Maricopa County supervisors heard for hours from dozens of people angry about the election, some demanding the county hold a revote, though there is no provision in state law allowing that. Supervisors unanimously approved the canvass.
“This was not a perfect election,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican. “But it was safe and secure. The votes have been counted accurately.”
Meanwhile, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner said he would decide in the next few days whether to allow an election challenge by Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, to move ahead.
Warner, who was appointed to the court in 2007 by Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, spoke after a Monday afternoon hearing. Hamadeh filed the lawsuit earlier this month against his opponent, Democrat Kris Mayes, who holds a 510-vote lead in the race, along with every county recorder in Arizona and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is now governor-elect.
The lawsuit alleges errors and inaccuracies at some voting centers and seeks to have Hamadeh installed as attorney general. A lawyer for Mayes says the suit is premature.
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Associated Press writers Terry Tang and Anita Snow in Phoenix and Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
Officials in a rural Arizona county Monday delayed the certification of November’s midterm elections, missing the legal deadline andleading the Arizona secretary of state’s office to sue over the county’s failure to sign off on the results.
By a 2-1 vote Monday morning, the Republican majority on the Cochise County Board of Supervisors pushed back certification until Friday, citing concerns about voting machines. Because Monday was the deadline for all 15 Arizona counties to certify their results, Cochise’s action could put at risk the votes of some 47,000 county residents and could inject chaos into the election if those votes go uncounted.
In the lawsuit filed by the office of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs – a Democrat who will be the state’s next governor – officials said failing to certify the election results violates state law and could “potentially disenfranchise” the county’s voters.
CNN has reached out to the supervisors for comment.
The standoff between officials in Cochise County and the Arizona secretary of state’s office illustrates how election misinformation is continuing to stoke controversy about the 2022 results in some corners of the country even though many of the candidates who echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were defeated in November.
A crowd of grassroots activists turned up at a special meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to loudly protest that county’s election administration procedures during a public comment portion of the meeting after problems with printers at voting locations on Election Day led to long lines at about a third of the county’s voting locations. In a new letter to the state attorney general’s office – which had demanded an explanation of the problems – the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said that “no voter was disenfranchised because of the difficulty the county experienced with some of its printers.”
Disputes over the results have erupted elsewhere.
In Pennsylvania, where counties also faced a Monday deadline to certify their general election balloting, local officials have faced an onslaught of petitions demanding recounts. And officials in Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, deadlocked Monday on whether to certify the results, according to multiple media reports. Election officials there did not respond to inquiries from CNN on Monday afternoon.
In a statement to CNN, officials with the Pennsylvania Department of State said they have reached out to Luzerne officials “to inquire about the board’s decision and their intended next steps.”
On Election Day, a paper shortage in Luzerne County prompted a court-ordered extension of in-person voting.
Arizona, another key battleground state, has long been a cauldron of election conspiracies. GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and GOP secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, both of whom pushed Trump’s lies about 2020, have refused to concede their races, as they continue to sow doubts about this year’s election results.
Lake’s campaign filed a lawsuit last week demanding more information from Maricopa County’s elections department about the number of voters who checked in to polling places compared to the ballots cast. And Arizona’s GOP attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh – who, like Lake and Finchem, was backed by Trump – filed a lawsuit in the state superior court in Maricopa County last week challenging the election results based on what the suit describes as errors in the management of the election.
Hamadeh is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount. But the lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the Arizona secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asks the court to declare Hamadeh as the winner. A recount cannot begin until the state’s votes are certified.
Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting is Local, said the drama over certification of the votes and the refusal by losing candidates to back down is part of an “infrastructure of election denial” that has been building since the 2020 election in Arizona.
“Those folks are going to continue to try and find fertile ground for their efforts to undermine our elections. They are not going to give up,” Gulotta said. “We had a whole slate of election deniers, many of whom were not elected.”
But their refusal to concede “was inevitable in Arizona, at least in this cycle, given the candidates. These aren’t good losers,” he added. “They said from the beginning that they would be bad losers.”
In Cochise County, the Republican officials on the county Board of Supervisors advocated for the delay, citing concerns about voting machines.
Ann English, the Democratic chairwoman, argued that there was “no reason for us to delay.”
But Republican commissioners Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, who have cited claims that the machines were not properly certified, voted to delay signing off on the results.Monday’s action marked the second time the Republican-controlled board has delayed certification. And it marked the latest effort by Republicans on the board to register their disapproval of vote-tallying machines. Earlier this month, they attempted to mount an expansive hand count audit of the midterm results, pitting them against Cochise’s election director and the county attorney, who warned that the gambit might break the law.
State election officials said the concerns cited by the Republican majority about the vote-tallying machines are rooted in debunked conspiracy theories.
The state’s election director Kori Lorick has confirmed in writing that the voting machines had been tested and certified – a point Hobbs reiterated in Monday’s lawsuit. She is asking the court to force the board to certify the results by Thursday.
An initial deadline of December 5 had been set for statewide certification. In the lawsuit, Hobbs’ lawyers said state law does allow for a slight delay if her office has not received a county’s results, but not past December 8 – or 30 days after the election.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the Secretary will have no choice but to complete statewide canvass by December 8 without Cochise County’s votes included,” her lawyers added.
If votes from this Republican stronghold somehow went uncounted, it could flip two races to Democrats: the contest for state superintendent and a congressional race in which Republican Juan Ciscomani already has been projected as the winner by CNN and other outlets.
In a recent opinion piece published in The Arizona Republic, two former election officials in Maricopa County – said the courts were likely to step in and force Cochise to certify the results.
But Republican Helen Purcell, a former Maricopa County recorder, and Tammy Patrick, a Democrat and the county’s former federal compliance officer, warned that “a Republican-controlled board of supervisors could end up disenfranchising their own voters and hand Democrats even more victories in the midterms.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Many of the candidates who promoted former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” were defeated in November, a pattern heralded by Democrats that is already reshaping the contours of the 2024 election – leading the former president to modulate his tone when he recently launched another bid for the White House.
But the efforts to cast doubts about the management and operation of the 2022 election are still festering in Arizona, long a hotbed of election conspiracies that spawned the sham audit of the 2020 Maricopa County results by the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas after Trump questioned Joe Biden’s victory there. The continuing election denialism underscores that although the highest profile promoters of Trump’s election lies were defeated, the efforts to undermine democracy will carry on.
Several Trump-backed Republican candidates at the top of Arizona’s ticket, including defeated GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, defeated Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, as well as GOP Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh – who is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount – have seized on a problem with Maricopa County’s printers on Election Day to make exaggerated claims about the election.
Maricopa officials have said that printer problems affected about 70 vote centers, preventing some ballots from being read by tabulator machines on Election Day, but that the problems were fixed and that those ballots were set aside in a secure ballot box and counted separately. Bill Gates, the Republican Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, called the inconvenience and the long lines that resulted “unfortunate” in one Twitter video but said “every voter had an opportunity to cast a vote on Election Day.”
But that has not stopped the issue from spiraling into a swirl of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the overall management of the election within the hard-right faction of Arizona’s Republican Party, despite the best efforts by other Republican election officials to squelch conspiracy theories and fact-check them in real time.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 election results, is once again among the officials signaling that it is time to move on.
Though Lake has not conceded in her race against Democrat Katie Hobbs, who is the current secretary of state, Ducey posted pictures Wednesday of his meeting with Hobbs on Twitter, noting that he had congratulated the governor-elect on “her victory in a hard-fought race and offered my full cooperation as she prepares to assume the leadership of the State of Arizona.”
The issues could come to a head next week. Monday is the deadline for counties in the Grand Canyon State to certify their general election results – with statewide certification slated to follow on December 5. Any recounts cannot begin until after certification. In the leadup to those events, Lake has posted videos and missives on Twitter insisting that she is “still in the fight.”
Because some voters were forced to stand in long lines – a unremarkable occurrence on Election Day in many states – Lake charged during a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s program “War Room” that her opponents “discriminated against people who chose to vote on Election Day.”
Rather than using Trump’s 2020 buzzwords like ‘rigged,’ Lake has generally used more narrow language, describing the management of the election as “botched” and “the shoddiest ever” while accusing Maricopa County of “dragging its feet” in providing information about the election to her campaign.
Marc Elias, an attorney specializing in election litigation who has taken a central role in pushing back against GOP efforts to restrict ballot access, noted in a post on his Democracy Docket website that Lake’s complaints about “voter suppression” were ironic given Republican’s efforts to limit voting access in recent years. He noted that there are videos on Lake’s Twitter feed of voters who “claimed that they waited in long lines to vote, were sent from one polling place to another by overworked election officials and had their provisional ballots rejected because they failed to register in time for the election.”
“If you didn’t know better, you might think Lake was a champion of access to voting, supporter of funding for election officials and advocate for same day voter registration. She is none of those,” Elias wrote.
Elias pointed out that the circumstance of voters being forced to wait in long lines due to equipment failures is not out of the ordinary.
“Long lines caused by insufficient or broken voting equipment is a tax usually paid by Black, brown and young voters. At the same time that voters in Maricopa County were waiting in two-hour lines, students at the University of Michigan were enduring near freezing temperatures during their six-hour long wait to cast their ballots,” Elias said.
But Lake’s arguments about problems with the election were bolstered by a letter from Arizona’s Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright last week to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office seeking information about what Wright described as “myriad problems that occurred in relation to Maricopa County’s administration of the 2022 General Election.” (Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is a Republican).
The letter requested information about ballot-on-demand printer configuration settings that contributed to problems getting ballots read by on-site ballot tabulators; as well as the procedures for handling ballots that were supposed to be segregated and placed in the secure ballot box; and information about the handling of voters who checked in at one polling place but wanted to check out to vote in a second voting location, either because of wait times or other issues.
Gates said the county would respond to the questions from the attorney general’s office “with transparency as we have done throughout this election” before it holds its public meeting on Monday to canvass the election. The canvass, Gates said, is “meant to provide a record of the votes counted and those that were not legally cast.”
“There will be no delays or games; we will canvass in accordance with state law,” he said in the statement.
But in Cochise County, a community of roughly 125,000 people in southeastern Arizona, the two Republicans on the three-person Board of Supervisors recently opted to delay a vote on certification until Monday’s deadline, citing their concerns about vote-tallying machines.
That prompted the Secretary of State’s office to threaten legal action if county did not complete certification by the deadline. Peggy Judd, one of the Republican supervisors who initially voted to delay action, told The Arizona Republic this week that she has decided to certify the results when the board meets.
CNN has reached out to Judd for comment.
Still, the 11th-hour drama in the Republican stronghold underscores the mistrust of standard election procedures that has taken hold in parts of this battleground state ever since Biden won the state in 2020, the first Democrat presidential nominee to do so in nearly a quarter century.
Officials in a second county – Mohave, in the northwest corner of the state – also voted to delay their certification until Monday’s deadline. But officials there described their move as a political statement to register displeasure with issues that arose on Election Day in Maricopa County.
Like Lake, Finchem has refused to concede his race to Democrat Adrian Fontes while he has sent out fundraising solicitations to his supporters claiming that he is trying to get to the bottom of “myriad issues” with the election. He has repeatedly called for a new election.
Hamadeh, the GOP attorney general candidate, filed a lawsuit in state superior court in Maricopa County this week challenging the election results based on what the suit describes as errors in the management of the election. Hamadeh’s lawsuit notes that plaintiffs are not “alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022 general election.”
But the lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the Arizona secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asking the court to declare Hamadeh as the winner – while alleging that there was an “erroneous count of votes,” “wrongful disqualification of provisional and early ballots” and “wrongful exclusion of provisional voters.” The Republican National Committee has joined the lawsuit.
Hamadeh trails Mayes by just 510 votes and the race is heading toward an automatic recount.
“Legal counsel for the Secretary of State’s Office is reviewing the election contest and preparing a response but believes the lawsuit is legally baseless and factually speculative,” a spokesperson for the office said Friday, adding that “none of the claims raised warrant the extraordinary remedy of changing the election results and overturning the will of Arizona voters.”
Lake has promised that her campaign’s attempt to get more information from election officials this week is only the beginning of her efforts. It remains to be seen whether she will have any more success than Trump did in his many failed lawsuits – and whether following a course that has now been resoundingly rejected by voters will be politically prudent as she lays the groundwork for her next act.
This story has been updated with additional information.
PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, has filed a public records lawsuit demanding Maricopa County hand over a variety of documents related to the election.
Lake has refused to acknowledge that she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs and has for weeks drawn attention to voters who said they experienced long lines and other difficulties while voting on Election Day in Arizona’s largest county.
Her lawyer, Tim LaSota, says in the suit filed Wednesday that the county has not fulfilled public records requests filed on Nov. 15 and 16. The requests seek to identify voters who may have had trouble casting a ballot, such as people who checked in at more than one vote center or those who returned a mail ballot and also checked in at a polling place.
Lake is also asking for information about counted and uncounted ballots that were accidentally mixed. County officials have acknowledged the problem occurred at a handful of vote centers but say it happens in most elections and can be reconciled.
Lake and her allies have bombarded Maricopa County with complaints about Election Day problems, which stem largely from a problem with printers at some vote centers that led them to print ballots with markings that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators. All ballots were counted, but Lake says some of her supporters may have been unable to cast a ballot amid the chaos.
Lake wants the county to produce the records before certifying the election. The Board of Supervisors, controlled 4-1 by Republicans, votes to certify the election on Monday, the deadline under state law. Certification votes are also scheduled for Monday in five other counties, including two where Republican supervisors voted earlier to delay certifying the election.
The statewide canvass is scheduled for Dec. 5.
County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, has said the county takes responsibility for the printer issue but blamed prominent Republicans including state GOP Chair Kelli Ward for exacerbating the problem by telling voters not to allow their ballots to be counted at the elections headquarters in downtown Phoenix.
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County elections officials, alleging they broke election laws. Lake also claimed that 118 polling centers appeared to have a “printer/tabulation problem,” although officials previously said there were 60 polling centers with printer issues that were fixed before polls closed.
Democrat Katie Hobbs, who currently serves as Arizona secretary of state, was projected as the winner of the race 10 days ago. Lake, a close ally of former President Donald Trump who has refused to acknowledge President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, has not yet conceded the governor’s race.
“We want some information,” Lake said. “We’re on a timeline, a very strict timeline when it comes to fighting this botched election, and they’re dragging their feet.”
Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake speaks to supporters during her election night event at The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch on November 08, 2022 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
/ Getty Images
On Election Day, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates said there were 60 polling sites that had printing problems, and they were fixed before polls closed. Gates said then that the printer issue was technical — the ink didn’t print dark enough for the machines to be readable.
But Lake alleged in the lawsuit that “because of the printer/tabulator problems, the polling locations were chaotic, voters were frustrated, and voters had to endure long lines.”
Lake’s lawsuit also asks for several public records, especially related to canvassing. The filing says that without access to the requested records, the plaintiff “cannot ascertain the full extent of the problems identified and their impacts on electors.”
Lake released a video last week saying she had “assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week.”
Lake has been alleging problems in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county which encompasses Phoenix, since Election Day. On Nov. 9, she said on Fox News that the state had “shoddy elections that are run by imbeciles” and if elected, she said she would call a special session of the Arizona Legislature to address it.
“We’re absolutely not slow-rolling it and if their team had been paying attention before the election, they would have heard us talk about this over and over again, that we would not have results on election night or even the next day,” Gates said. “That it was going to take several days. And quite frankly it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are slow rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”
Lake, however, had disproved one of the former president’s claims just weeks ago.
Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that there was a large number of voting machines in Arizona’s “Republican areas” that were “BROKEN” on Election Day, part of a conspiracy theory that Lake peddled on Twitter earlier this week, Mediaite noted.
Trump, later in his post, attempted to sell Lake’s conspiracy theory to his followers by bringing the election-denying candidate into the heart of his unfounded claim.
″[Voters] left the voting lines in complete exasperation, unable to return. When ‘mechanics’ went in to fix the machines, they got worse. Kari Lake couldn’t even vote in her own district,” Trump wrote.
He continued: “Voter fraud – DO THE ELECTION OVER, or declare Kari, Blake [Masters], Abe [Hamadeh] the winners. Act Fast!!!”
Trump’s claim that Lake couldn’t vote in her district, however, has been debunked by the candidate herself, who has already said she traveled to a different area and had no problems.
“We switched from a Republican area to vote, we came right down into the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines,” Lake said on Election Day.
“And guess what? They’ve had zero problems with their machines today. Not one machine spit out a ballot here today, not one in a very liberal area.”
Voting sites in Arizona’s Maricopa County did experience printing issues which stopped the counting of some ballots, however, those issues were not limited to areas that tend to vote Republican or Democrat, the Associated Press found.
Voters were able to try another tabulator at sites, cancel and go to another site to vote or put their ballots in a box that would be brought to and counted at Maricopa County’s tabulation center later.
Outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday his Republican administration will ensure an orderly transition to Democrat Katie Hobbs, his first public statement on her victory.
Ducey met with Hobbs in his office more than a week after her victory became clear and days after the last ballots were counted. However, defeated Republican Kari Lake has not conceded and has worked since the election to draw attention to voters who say they were affected by a problem with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County.
“All of us have waited patiently for the democratic process to play out,” Ducey said in a statement. “The people of Arizona have spoken, their votes have been counted and we respect their decision.”
Ducey called to congratulate Hobbs the day after The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race, but he had not made a public statement about the outcome before Wednesday.
Ducey was co-chairman of the Republican Governors Association, which spent more than $10 million on television ads attacking Hobbs, but he was not an enthusiastic supporter of Lake. He endorsed her rival in the GOP primary and, though he endorsed the entire GOP ticket for the general election, he did not campaign with Lake.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey speaks during a rally for President Donald Trump at the International Air Response facility on October 19, 2018 in Mesa, Arizona.
Ralph Freso / Getty Images
Hobbs, currently secretary of state, has formed a transition team that is vetting potential staff and preparing for her to become the first Democrat to hold the state’s top office since Janet Napolitano stepped down to be U.S. Homeland Security secretary after the 2008 election.
The Ducey-Hobbs meeting came a day after the Republican National Committee and the GOP candidate for Arizona attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, filed an election challenge in his race, which is slated for an automatic recount with Hamadeh trailing by 510 votes.
That challenge, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, alleges a variety of problems affected the outcome of the extremely tight race. It says some ballots were counted that should not have been while others were rejected when they should have been counted. It alleges election workers made mistakes in duplicating ballots that could not be read by electronic tabulators and in determining the intent of voters when ballots were ambiguous.
The suit also claims some voters in Maricopa County were denied an opportunity to vote because of a widely publicized problem at some vote centers where printers produced ballots with markings that were too light to be read by on-site tabulators. Some voters experiencing problems left without voting and didn’t check out with poll workers, so they were unable to vote elsewhere because the county’s computer system shows them as voting.
The suit says Hamadeh and the RNC are not “alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022 general election.”
“The voters of Arizona demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials,” Hamadeh said in a statement.
Democrat Kris Mayes will ask a judge to dismiss Hamadeh’s complaint, Mayes attorney Dan Barr said.
“Abe Hamadeh’s complaint is devoid of actual facts,” Barr said in a statement. “It does not plausibly allege that mistakes in the administration of the election actually occurred, and if they did occur, that they would have made any difference in the result.”
Election Day votes went overwhelmingly for Republicans, but Democrats dominated mail ballots.
Maricopa County officials have acknowledged that some voters were inconvenienced by issues with printers, which were resolved in the early afternoon of Election Day. Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates has said the problems were made worse by prominent Republicans who led their supporters to fear ballots would not be counted.
