MAGA County Election Deniers Find Out

A series of legal blows have struck hard at MAGA efforts to refuse to certify elections.

Mug shots of indicted Cochise County, AZ officials Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd

It’s one of the most common questions I get asked: What happens if local officials in the battleground states simply refuse to certify their county’s election?

Our elections are run by the states, and within each state, the task of administrating and certifying the vote usually falls to county level officials. Before our elections became horribly politicized over bogus claims of fraud, no one much noticed or cared who was on these boards. Their tasks were ministerial in nature, and there was no talk of conspiracies or refusals to certify.

But during the 2020 election, we got a taste of what can go horribly wrong. Two bad faith actors on the Board of Canvassers for Wayne County, Michigan, threatened to withhold certification of that county’s results. Normally, certification is a boring and routine administrative matter. But suddenly, the entire state’s results were on the line. 

You see, Wayne County, which is home to Detroit, had gone overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. Those votes, largely from African Americans, put him over the top. But two members of the Board, who believed Trump’s Big Lie about the election being stolen, leveraged tiny discrepancies in the poll book counts—something that had never before prevented certification —to delay certification. For a moment, Michigan’s critical electoral votes, and possibly the entire national election, was imperiled by two rogue county officials.

The officials backed down a day later under intense public pressure from outraged citizens. But even after that, they were told in a phone call that they could rescind their votes to certify by no less than ex-president Trump and then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel. Happily, Michigan law provides no such ability to undo their vote.

That experience was a preview of what we would begin to see in future canvasses where MAGA election deniers held local positions of authority and were egged on by GOP leaders. Given these past examples, are we ready for what’s to come in November?

We’re starting to get some answers, and they should provide some assurances that the folks in charge are indeed aware and ready to take action where needed. They also serve as a warning to MAGA disrupters that it won’t go well for them if they try anything. 

In today’s piece, I’ll cover examples from three jurisdictions from battleground states, among the dozens of cases pending across the country, to give a flavor of how county level MAGA election deniers are being met and smacked down by ordinary citizens, state level officials and, in one breaking case, even the state criminal justice system.

Washoe County, Nevada

During the 2024 primaries, three Washoe County Commissioners became stubborn holdouts when they refused to certify the results for their county. Their holdout began back on July 9, when the Commission voted 3-2 to reject certification of two recounts, even after they had approved the original canvas by a 3-2 vote just the month before.

Voting advocates were understandably outraged at the July vote, noting that the recounts had produced few changes from the original count, and that the refusal to certify created disinformation and sowed distrust in the democratic process.

The swing vote was Commissioner Clara Andriola, who had initially voted to certify then asked for a reconsideration of that vote. It took the Washoe County District Attorney’s office leaning on Andriola for her finally to come around. 

The lowering of that boom had its intended effect. Andriola said in a statement, made just eight days later, that the DA’s office had provided “clarifying direction on the nature of our duties to canvas the election returns.”

She also acknowledged that the top levels of state government had gotten involved: The Nevada Secretary of State, Democrat Cisco Aguilar, and the Nevada state Attorney General, Democrat Aaron Ford, had both petitioned the state’s highest court to intervene and act as soon as possible to compel the officials to certify the election recount results in accordance with state law. 

As the Nevada Current reported,

In a joint statement, Ford and Aguilar warned Washoe County was undermining voter confidence in elections by rejecting the results. 

“This vote has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for elections in Nevada,” Aguilar said in a statement. “It is unacceptable that any public officer would undermine the confidence of their voters.”

Andriola seemed chastened by the experience. “Essentially, it is my crystal clear understanding that canvassing elections—whether it’s a primary, general, or recount—as defined in statute is a legal duty and affords no discretion to refuse,” Andriola said. “In America, in Nevada, and right here in Washoe County, we can and must do everything we can to restore faith and confidence in our elections.”

The new vote was still 3-2, with only Andriola changing her vote. But it did manage to moot the petition before the Supreme Court, which could have very quickly accomplished the same thing, along with a public lashing from the Court.

But has the Washoe County GOP learned from this? Apparently not. Just yesterday, Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent noted another conspiracy whirling there:

Here we go again.

Washoe GOP, one of the most irresponsible organizations in Nevada, sent this out today:

“We have received a report that twice, persons voting on a machine had the machine alter their vote from Trump to Harris.”

A report, eh? These people are so irresponsible.

The Nevada AG and the Secretary of State have their eyes on Washoe, however, and it’s unlikely those Commissioners will get away with much under such scrutiny.

Surry County, North Carolina

Let’s hop over to North Carolina, where it took a formal complaint by an outraged citizen to get rid of two Surry County board members who had also refused to certify local elections. 

Here’s the gist of what happened. Jerry Forestieri and Timothy DeHaan, like dozens of other election denying MAGA loyalists on local county boards, refused to certify the results of the 2022 midterm elections. But the reasons for their refusal were rooted in something that had happened years before.

According to a letter written to the Board, Forestieri and DeHaan had a problem with a particular federal judge, whom they described as “delusional” and, without irony, “the worst election denier in our State and the USA.” They called her ruling on election cases “illegal” and claimed it gave “protection to felonious voter fraud.” DeHaan even admitted that the election was held according to the law, but that “the law is not right.”

In short, they sought nullification of the law by refusing to recognize and perform their duties laid out by North Carolina statute. And they leveraged their positions on the Surry County board to make their point. 

The result? Both board members were summarily removed by a unanimous vote of the State Board of Elections. This illustrates and sets an important precedent for another avenue for quick relief and action at the state level to stop county level mischief: simply removing the offending Board members from their positions. Under North Carolina state law,

The State Board shall have power to remove from office any member of a county board of elections for incompetency, neglect or failure to perform duties, fraud, or for any other satisfactory cause.

Now that the State Board of Elections has some practice removing bad apples from the barrel, county level officials testing the limits of their power during the upcoming election may find themselves quickly out of office.

Cochise County, Arizona

In perhaps one of the most egregious and closely watched election certification refusal cases, a Cochise County, Arizona supervisor, Peggy Judd, pled guilty on Monday to a misdemeanor for failing to perform her official duties. By accepting the plea deal, Judd avoided a costly and risky trial on felony charges after she and another supervisor, Tom Crosby, intentionally delayed certification of the 2022 election. 

This is the first instance I’m aware of where a criminal sanction has successfully been imposed upon an official who has refused to certify the election. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) noted in its lengthy report on the risks of refusals to certify elections around the country, “A county official who willfully subverts the certification process could be prosecuted under various provisions of the Arizona election code.”

Interference with an election officer, for example, is a class 5 felony in Arizona. And if you knowingly refuse to certify the election, that’s a class 6 felony for which you presumptively would spend a year in jail if convicted.

Arizona’s Democratic Attorney General, Kris Mayes, was clear about the find out part. “Any attempt to interfere with elections in Arizona will not be tolerated. My office will continue to pursue justice and ensure that anyone who undermines our electoral system is held accountable,” Mayes said in a statement. She added, “Today’s plea agreement and sentencing should serve as a strong reminder that I will not hesitate to use every tool available to uphold the rule of law and protect the integrity of Arizona’s elections.”

Judd apparently was a true believer of the Big Lie. She had even attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, but in an interview with the Tucson Sentinel denied entering the Capitol building itself.

The refusal by Judd and Crosby to certify in Cochise were notable in that they were politically egged on by other members of the GOP in Arizona, including candidate Kari Lake who failed in her governor bid in 2022. Their intransigence was not only driven by claims that the ballot tabulators in their own county were not properly certified, but also in protest over the election results in another part of the state entirely. Rather amazingly, Judd told both the New York Times and The Daily Beast that her delay in certifying, which lasted until past the statutory deadline, was a form of protest against Election Day problems that happened in Maricopa County.

Judd is no stranger to legal woes. After her shenanigans, she was sued in civil court by the Arizona Secretary of State and a voting rights advocacy group to compel her to certify and ordered last year to pay $36,000 in legal fees. Further, according to her attorney, the criminal case “pretty much bankrupted her.”

Her fellow election denying supervisor, Tom Crosby appears to be taking his chances with the indictment. When asked if his client was interested in a plea deal, his attorney, Dennis Wilenchik, said: “It does not look that way.”

The MAGA cult destroys so many lives.

Across the country, lawyers for election denying officials are likely telling their clients to pay attention. You could be ordered to comply, removed from office, fined or even jailed if you persist. And Democrats who valiantly sit on boards with election deniers now have powerful anecdotal narratives to deliver to any of their wayward colleagues: Persist in this behavior and it will end badly for you.

This may not prevent all of the election certification refusals from occurring. Zealots will often ignore the risks to their careers and reputations in fruitless service of the MAGA movement. But Democratic state officials aren’t messing around, and they are in control or positions of authority in all of the battleground states except Georgia—which is probably why Trump and the State Election Board there keep pushing the boundaries and getting smacked down by the courts.

I have confidence that law enforcement and state officials are ready for what is to come because they have been dealing with it since 2022. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have cease and desist letters and writs of mandamus at the ready, given what we know about MAGA disruption plans.