Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould filed a lawsuit against Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes over her threat to prosecute him if he voted in favor of conducting a hand count of the 2024 election. He asked the court in the complaint, which was filed on January 19, to rule “[t]hat Plaintiff should not be subjected to threats and intimidation by the Attorney General for voting to have hand counting be the primary initial method of vote tabulation.”
Represented by Wilenchik & Bartness, Gould (pictured above, right) described the threat, “This case is about an elected official potentially losing his liberty and being jailed as a criminal, if Defendant Mayes is correct, for voting according to his conscience, and pursuant to the will of his constituents, based on election statutes that appear not to bar his intended support for vote counting based on hand counting and not the use of electronic voting machines.”
The complaint said, “Defendant Mayes has further proven her intention to prosecute elected officials who disagree with her interpretation of Title 16 election statutes, as demonstrated by her recent indictment of other Board of Supervisors in other Counties who exercised their rights and obligations, and she appears to be doing so for political reasons, while claiming otherwise.” Mayes (pictured above, left) is prosecuting Cochise County Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd for voting to delay the Cochise County 2022 election certification by three days.
Gould asserted that hand counting was “the only method of tabulating elections prior to the development of current electronic voting technologies that have been criticized for their deficiencies.”
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