Apparently, No Lawyer Wants to Defend Cochise County’s Refusal to Certify Election Results

The increasing ridiculousness of the stance of the supervisors in Cochise County, Ariz., appears to be another hard lesson of, “Don’t elect lunatics to positions of serious public responsibility”:

Cochise County officials may go to court Thursday without an attorney to represent them against charges that they broke the law by failing to certify the results of the Nov. 8 election.

County supervisors on Tuesday voted to hire attorney Bryan Blehm to defend them and the county government against two lawsuits, even though they had not discussed the matter with him. On Wednesday, they were caught flat-footed when Blehm declined the offer, as did another attorney he had recommended.

The three supervisors are due in a Bisbee courtroom at 1 p.m. as a judge considers requests from Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, as well as a retiree group, to order the board to certify election results. That certification, by law, was due Monday. But on a 2-1 vote, the board voted to delay a decision until week’s end.

Blehm represented the self-named “Cyber Ninjas,” the group that ran the controversial Maricopa County audit of the 2020 election. Apparently, he took one look at the county supervisors’ situation and said, “No thanks.”

When no lawyer wants to take your case, that’s probably a sign that you’ve stumbled into a position that is exceptionally difficult to defend in a court of law.

If you are a Republican officeholder, you enjoy the same First Amendment rights as anyone else and have every right to publicly argue that the Arizona election had too many problems to be legitimate. You would be wrong on the facts, as Maricopa County’s elections department — and county lawyer Rachel Mitchell — have declared, repeatedly, that “every voter was afforded the ability to legally and securely cast their ballot,” despite the problems with the printers printing too lightly to be scanned. Every ballot was legible to the naked eye; it was simply a matter of whether those ballots could be tabulated in the machine at the polling place.

Several days ago, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors canvassed the 2022 General Election, certifying that the election results are accurate and providing a full accounting of all the ballots cast in the election. The board of supervisors has four Republicans and one Democrat. All of them certified the election results and declared them “safe, secure, and accurate.”

Those who contend that Kari Lake is the true winner need to point to some evidence that more than 17,000 Maricopa County voters wanted to cast a ballot for Lake but could not. To contend that the Maricopa County government was plotting to defeat Lake means that a large group of Republican officials conspired to break the law in order to elect Katie Hobbs.

So claiming that the election was fraudulent, stolen, or otherwise illegitimate may be nonsensical, but it is entirely protected speech under the First Amendment. But if you are a Republican officeholder, you have more than First Amendment rights to think about; you have a duty of office to fulfill. You don’t get to withhold your own county’s election results because you believe in some nutty conspiracy theory about some other county’s election results.

Remember, the Cochise County supervisors aren’t contending there’s anything wrong, illegitimate, fraudulent, or disputable about their own county’s election results, which they’re currently refusing to certify. Their objection is that Maricopa County’s results can’t be trusted. But they have no legal authority over Maricopa County’s election process.

County certification of the election results is not a potential hostage offered to county supervisors, to be used whenever they want to indulge their egos and insist that their preferred statewide candidate simply must have won.