Arizona's top election official Katie Hobbs is preparing for Arizona counties to certify their election results on Monday's deadline after a tumultuous election cycle beset by unsubstantiated claims of fraud in Arizona's election, protests outside election offices, and attacks on the integrity of the process she oversees.
"We've been in communication with all the counties, and the election officials have told us they don't anticipate any delays in certification," Hobbs told Insider in a Friday interview. "But we've been really clear that the statutory requirement for county certification is not discretionary, so we are prepared to take legal action if there are any delays."
The certification of election results, which counties and states conduct after all votes cast have been accounted for and in some cases, after audits are conducted, are the next step in the process of the Electoral College voting to make Biden president.
With the Trump's campaign's legal challenges largely falling flat across the board, President Donald Trump and his allies have pivoted to trying to delay local and state officials from certifying the results of an election to make them official, including in Arizona, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
In one particularly potent example this week, the four-person canvassing board in Wayne County, Michigan, deadlocked on whether to certify the county's election results, with two Republican members initially opposing certification, reversing course and agreeing to certify the results after a public outcry, and the next day, signing affidavits indicating they wanted to take back their votes, which have already been sent to the state.
President-elect Joe Biden won Arizona's 11 Electoral College votes, making him the first Democrat to do so since 1996, Decision Desk HQ and Insider projected.
The Arizona Republican Party recently lost a court case seeking to order Maricopa County, the state's largest, to conduct a full hand-count audit of ballots, which could have delayed the county from certifying its election results, and is continuing to urge other counties to hold off on certifying.
As CNN noted, none of the post-election audits conducted by counties nor any of the lawsuits filed in court by Republicans have uncovered any kind of systemic fraud or irregularities in Arizona's election.
Republican Rep.Paul Gosar even said outright that he believes the state should not certify its results and that the GOP-controlled state legislature should override the will of the voters and appoint its own slate of electors, a concept that Hobbs called a "pie-in-the-sky, never going to happen in this election" scenario.
"This is hardly the first inflammatory statement that Paul Gosar has made this election, including coming directly at me and undermining my integrity," Hobbs told Insider. "What is also clear in his statement is that he doesn't know what the laws of the state are because the legislature has absolutely no legal authority to appoint new electors. The legislature's role is in establishing the laws that govern the selection of electors in our state, which they have done."
Secretaries of state, who serve as the chief election officials in most US states, not only oversee and guide officials at the local level but have served as resources for accurate information about their state's elections and as bulwarks against misinformation in the 2020 election.
Hobbs, who went into politics from a background as a social worker, served as a state legislator and minority leader of the Arizona state senate before being elected as Arizona's Secretary of State in 2018, has devoted significant resources and attention to combatting misinformation, including some spread by officials in her state.