PHOENIX — Arizona’s 2024 general election was mostly put to bed Monday morning when the state’s top officials gathered to complete the official canvass.
The procedural step could be described as uneventful, unlike the last time the presidential race was on the ballot.
In 2020, then-Gov. Doug Ducey famously silenced his phone when Donald Trump called him as he signed the paperwork for Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and his surrogates would go on to sow doubt about the integrity of Arizona’s elections for the next four years.
This time, Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes and Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer went about signing the required documents and taking questions from reporters without the storm clouds of election denialism hovering overhead.
Fontes ran down some of the canvass numbers, noting that 3,428,011 ballots were cast, which represents a 78.5% turnout. Trump wound up defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of 187,382 votes in the presidential race.
Now that the canvass is completed, the only things left to be finalized are the results of a few races that were close enough to trigger automatic recounts under state law. There are three automatic recounts in Maricopa County: for the District 3 seat on the Board of Supervisors, for Legislative District 2 in the state House and for the Fountain Hills Town Council.
Hobbs recalls how different 2020 canvass was
Hobbs noted the how different the atmosphere was at this year’s canvass compared to when she was secretary of state for the 2020 election certification.
“I can’t help but think back to four years ago when we certified the last presidential election in a backdrop of raging conspiracy theories [and] attempts to stop certification across the country that all culminated in an attempted insurrection,” Hobbs said.
That unrest was driven by Trump’s refusal to accept his loss and his baseless claims of voter fraud. Officials were anticipating a possible repeat in the event of another Trump loss, but it became a non-issue after voters sent him back to the White House.
“All of the lead-up to potentially challenging the election that we saw from one side in the presidential race went away as soon as the results were what people wanted,” Hobbs said.
Is this the end of election denialism in Arizona?
Hobbs and Fontes both expressed hope the country can return to the way things were before 2020 in terms of accepting election results, regardless of which side wins.
“I think given the fact that Arizona has essentially the same elections folks running under the same elections rules with the same elections systems — and we seem to have done a pretty doggone good job this time around — I think the age of election denialism is for all intents and purposes dead,” Fontes said.
Mayes, however, wasn’t as optimistic as her Democratic colleagues.
She said it was up to the officials sitting alongside her, as well as others across the state, to continue reinforcing the message that Arizona’s elections are safe, secure and accurate.
“I think the proof is in the pudding,” she said. “We’ll see over the next couple of election cycles what happens, but I don’t think that we’re there yet.”
