Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes exceeded his authority when he made changes to the state’s election manual in 2023, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled on Dec. 19.
The state may not enforce the now-invalidated provisions of the election manual, including one that would have allowed the secretary of state to canvass election results even if a county had not certified its ballots, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blane ruled.
“Nothing in the statutes permits the Secretary to exclude a particular county’s canvass and/or, by extension, disenfranchise the entirety of the county’s voters,” Blaney wrote in his ruling. “The Secretary does not have the authority to read such a drastic course of action into the governing statutes.”…