Arizona AG will seek to revive 2020 ‘fake elector’ case

The Arizona attorney general’s office said on Thursday that it will seek fresh indictments against a group of so-called fake electors after the state’s highest court refused to revive the 2020 election subversion case.

“The Arizona Attorney General’s Office will return this case to the grand jury,” a spokesperson for Attorney General Kris Mayes’s (D) office said in a statement to The Hill. “We decline to comment further at this time.”

The move comes after the state Supreme Court denied Mayes’s appeal of a lower court order that required prosecutors to send the case back to a grand jury, the latest setback in the state’s efforts to prosecute individuals accused of helping President Trump in his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) and more than a dozen other GOP Trump allies were charged in 2024 for their roles in an alleged scheme to push false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race. That included the signing of “fake elector” documents in which some of them purported to be the state’s valid electors, according to prosecutors.

Former President Biden defeated Trump by just a little more than 10,000 votes in Arizona that year, one of the tightest margins in the country.

A Maricopa County judge ordered Mayes’s office last May to send the case back to a grand jury after finding that the original panel should have been provided with a copy of the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law outlining procedures for counting and certifying electoral votes following presidential election that was central to the defense’s argument.

“An independent grand jury of ordinary Arizonans found that there was sufficient cause to charge the defendants with the alleged crimes,” Mayes said in November, announcing her intention to appeal. “These defendants were charged based on two things: the facts and the law.”

Three of the defendants have already resolved their cases, according to The Associated Press, including one Republican activist who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document in August 2024.

Similar cases were brought in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin in the wake of the 2020 election but not all remain active.

A federal judge in Michigan dismissed charges against 15 defendants last September, and a case in Georgia — in which Trump was a defendant —was also dropped. The Peach State decision came months after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) was disqualified due to a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to lead the case.