While Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was in D.C. this week smearing election integrity advocates as election “deniers,” a lawsuit was filed against Maricopa County election officials by the local nonprofit civic group Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona and Eric Lovelis, a Maricopa County resident and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
County officials “are fully aware of the myriad deficiencies in how they administer elections, yet they have consistently failed to take effective action to rectify them,” the lawsuit claims. “The Defendants’ administration of elections in Maricopa County has been sloppy, shoddy, and rife with mistakes.
Filed by America First Legal, a law firm founded by former Trump administration officials, the suit names all of Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors, including its chairman, Bill Gates, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder.
It lays out a litany of alleged election law violations from recent major election cycles. The complaint seeks injunctions and writs of mandamus ordering the county to observe election statutes properly to prevent the 2024 election from being “marred by the same mistakes and maladministration as the 2020 and 2022 elections.”
At a panel discussion put on by the Election Center on Tuesday, Fontes downplayed election integrity concerns to the audience of election officials and media: “Some of what’s going to happen there [in the 2024 election] is what we see every single cycle, the occasional human error. Unfortunately now, bad actors with bad intent are going to blow these things out of proportion and pretend like
