Cochise County supervisor needs help with legal bills after refusing to certify 2022 election
Download mp3 (10.09 MB)Late last year, an Arizona grand jury indicted two Cochise County supervisors over their role in refusing to certify the 2022 election. A judge ultimately forced them to, although one of them still did not.
Now, facing mounting legal bills, the supervisor who ultimately did vote to certify the election, Peggy Judd, says help to pay those bills has not come.
Jen Fifield has written about this. She’s a reporter for Votebeat, and she joined The Show to talk more about this.
Interview highlights
What kind of help was Peggy Judd hoping for/expecting here?
FIFIELD: Well, if you remember last summer, a few state senators, Sonny Borrelli and Wendy Rogers toured the state promising legal help to supervisors if they wanted to hand count their ballots in 2024. So Peggy Judd had already done that in 2022. She now faces this indictment. She had just been interviewed by the grand jury at the time. She was watching the supervisors do this, and she wondered where that help was for her if she had already done this vote, and now she faced these pending legal challenges.
So, had there been an explicit offer to help her or was it kind of an assumption?
FIFIELD: Well, when she did the hand count vote, she immediately got free legal services from an attorney that has also helped Kari Lake, He, someone paid his $10,000 retainer. So she had already had this offered to her in the past and it wasn't a direct "if you don't certify the election, we will help you." But it was her watching that next summer, these promises being made for the future and wondering where this help was for her.
How does she feel about all this?
FIFIELD: You know, she's, she hasn't spoken a lot to the media, but I did get a hold of her as I was working on a different story a few weeks ago. And she called me later and said, "You know what? I feel bitter. I feel like I was misled by people and I am not, you know, I am not happy that nothing is coming my way when I'm still getting emails from Mike Lindell, the election skeptic who promises help and collects donations for these purposes, and he's not helping me."
He's soliciting donations from Peggy Judd to help folks like Peggy Judd and not helping her?
FIFIELD: Well, his, his mass email list is, let's just say that. You know, he sends out these email blasts and, and she's on the receiving end and just feeling a little bitter about watching him collect money for something she's not getting supported on.
Did she give you a sense of how big her legal bills have gotten so far?
FIFIELD: You know, she didn't. But I, I have spoken to the other supervisor a little bit about that and he's, you know, collecting as much money as he can. He says this is definitely more than the $3500 she's collected from a online fundraiser that she took on. So I, you know, she obviously has a yearlong prosecution at this point on her name.
Just for clarification, where does that case stand at this point? The grand jury indicted Peggy Judd and her colleague on the Cochise County Board of Supervisors late last year. Where do we stand in terms of further proceedings?
FIFIELD: There's actually oral arguments on the case, this Friday and a trial may be set in May, the, the scheduling for the trial. And so we're looking at this playing out this summer.
Another story you've reported on deals with a new state law related to where ballots are counted. It basically stemmed from some confusion and sounds like some maybe competing interpretations of what the laws had been.
FIFIELD: So this is pretty wonky. But if you, if you think back to 2022, there were claims that, you know, ballots were inserted later in the process. And there was a real intent of the lawmakers this year in the state Legislature to put in a place, a law, that says you have to track when someone drops off their ballot at the mail ballot at a polling place. You have to count right then and there. You can't let it be transferred over to a counting facility before its initial and not ... tallied. So you're not opening the envelope. You're just saying how many you got.
So this is pretty detailed. But if you think about being a poll worker, you're there for 14 hours a day, you have these 2,000 ballots maybe dropped off at your polling place. And someone says to you: "Now count how many there are to you." And you're tired, and you want to go home. They tried to do it in the Presidential Preference Election in Maricopa County, and it didn't go, well. There were many mistakes and this is just going to lead to people thinking that there's errors in counting that in, in the count when really poll workers might just not get it right.
So what does the new law require? What will poll workers and lection officials have to do, and what maybe are they precluded from doing?
FIFIELD: So, like I said, the intent of the lawmakers was to pass this law saying you have to do this at the polling place. It's the poll workers that are doing this. But there's been feedback across the counties to the Secretary of State's Office, for example, saying, we don't think the law actually says that. If you read the direct language of the law, we don't think it says a location. And so that's what my story was looking at. You know, if this is going to cause mistakes or even the perception of errors, then are we going to do it when the law does not say that we have to?
KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.
