PHOENIX β Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is going to court to block Attorney General Mark Brnovich from taking action against her for temporarily taking an online candidate signature-gathering website offline for updating.
Brnovich is pursuing βunfounded and unprecedented enforcement actionβ against Hobbs, threatening her with criminal prosecution βfor performing her duties as the stateβs chief elections officer,β Hobbsβ attorney, Roopali Desai, said in new legal filings.
The lawsuit asks a Maricopa County judge to block Brnovich from initiating any civil or criminal complaints against Hobbs. A hearing is set to begin at 9 a.m. Monday Feb.14, before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joan Sinclair.
Brnovich spokeswoman Katie Conner dismissed the lawsuit as a bid by Hobbs to βpoliticize every issue.β
βShe seems more concerned with avoiding the blame than fixing the problem,β Conner said in a prepared statement.
The dispute is over the E-Qual system, first established in 2011, which allows candidates to get signatures they need for nomination online. Normally there are no major issues.
This year, however, the Independent Redistricting Commission drew new district lines for legislative and congressional candidates.
Hobbs said that requires her to take the system offline next month to account for the new districts, as the voter registration system β which determines if signers live within the districts of candidates theyβre supporting β cannot accommodate more than one set of maps. The system wonβt be available for about three weeks to those running for Congress or the Legislature, but candidates can still gather signatures using pen and paper.
That led to a letter from Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright warning that any move to do so would be βcontrary to law,β floating the possibility that Hobbs could be charged with a minimum of a Class 3 misdemeanor, jailed for up to 30 days and fined $500 for knowingly refusing to perform a duty required under state election laws, or even with a felony.
βThis threat against the secretary is not only legally baseless, but also dangerous,β Desai wrote. βIt is part of a larger systematic effort to undermine election officialsβ ability to oversee and administer elections in the wake of the 2020 election. Election officials across the country have faced unprecedented harassment β and demands to be locked up or worse β simply for doing their jobs.β
Desai said Brnovich, a Republican who is hoping to be the GOP nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, is singling out Hobbs, a Democrat running for governor.
βLast time Arizonaβs congressional and legislative maps changed, then-Secretary Ken Bennett took E-Qual offline to allow counties to update votersβ districts in the voter registration system,β Desai noted. There was no litigation.
Brnovich took no action against Hobbsβ predecessor Michele Reagan in 2016 after she didnβt update the E-Qual system to comply with new requirements to extend the system to certain local candidates, Desai added.
No date has been set for a hearing.
