Thursday, December 01, 2022

Rule of Law, Bay-Bee!

Kari Lake wanted them to go to jail: Although I admire the way Kari Lake offers up other people as sacrificial lambs for her conspiracy theories:
"But I wish that somebody would say, 'You know what? Arrest me then. I don't care,'" Lake remarked. "We need people with courage to say, 'Class what felony? Go ahead, go for it, arrest me because this is a botched election and you're disenfranchising the folks in Mohave County when you allow this kind of election in Maricopa County to stand.'"

Unfortunately for her, arrest was never an option. The supervisors either followed the law, or the law would ignore the vote in Cochise county, giving two races to Democrats. And yet one of the supervisors said she resented being “forced” to vote.

The cure for that is to resign her position. Her vote is a ministerial duty, not a personal choice.  Although the story now is that they never meant to not vote.  It was the agenda the was bad;

The pair had previously said they refused to certify the election results based on the false belief that the electronic tabulators the county uses have not been certified under state and federal law.

But Crosby acknowledged in court on Thursday that wasn’t true, telling the judge that the supervisors had only failed to certify the election results by the deadline because the certification hadn’t been properly put on the agenda for the Nov. 28 board meeting and that the supervisors fully intended to certify the results during a meeting set for Friday morning.

That explanation was different than what Judd told national media outlets this week. She told both the New York Times and the Daily Beast that the delay in certifying the election — past the statutory deadline — was a form of protest against Election Day problems that happened in Maricopa County.
Gee, I wonder which "explanation" was the real one?

Judd remained defiant Thursday afternoon, even as she voted to canvass the election.

“I can’t say enough about how important this effort is that we made and I am not ashamed of anything that I did,” Judd said.
And yes, it was a purely ministerial act:

In ordering the board to certify the election, [Judge] McGinley said that state law is explicitly clear that the board has a nondiscretionary duty to canvass the election and has no statutory authority to reject the results.

A county board can only delay the canvass beyond the deadline, on a day-to-day basis, if some of the results are missing. But none of the supervisors in Cochise County had claimed that any of their results are missing, giving them no justification for failing to meet the deadline for approving the election results.

And further behind the scenes, they really wanted the judge to let them have their little circus first;

McGinley initially favored allowing the board to canvass the election on Friday — something the board had already intended to do, Crosby and Judd told him. But English asked him to order them to meet Thursday because the Republican commissioners weren’t simply planning to meet to approve the election.

English said the meeting agenda, which had been made public earlier, included “sort of a smack down between the Secretary of State and election deniers that (Crosby) has on the agenda.”

The supervisors planned to give the election deniers 12 minutes each to state their cases and then would give the secretary of state a chance to respond to their claims, before a vote to certify the election results. Set to speak during the meeting were Paul Rice, Daniel Wood and Brian Stein, who are all 2020 Maricopa County election deniers. Then Crosby, who sets the board’s agenda, had time set aside for the Secretary of State’s Office to make its case for why the election was valid.

So that whole "agenda" problem that blocked them from voting in a timely manner.  Turns out that wasn't such a passive problem after all.

Rule of law, bay-bee.  Makes you do what you ran for office to do.
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