Two election deniers are under indictment. They’ll join dozens of others back on election boards for 2024

After Donald Trump lost the state of Arizona in 2020, Cochise County Board of Supervisors members Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd repeatedly tried to delay certifying the results, citing debunked reports that voting machines were corrupted.

On November 27, 2023, a grand juryindicted Judd and Crosby on felony charges of conspiracy and interference with an election officer.

They’ll scheduled to be back on the board when it meets to certify 2024’s results.

Judd and Crosby are among more than 30 officials in eight states who refused to certify 2020 results but who are set to return to their positions to potentially do it again in 2024, according to a report from democracy watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Election interference threats have only continued to escalate in the years since the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 election, when local-level attempts to block results were in parallel with the Trump campaign’s spurious legal efforts to reject them in courts.

The report identified at least five election-denying county-level officials in Arizona, eight in Georgia, five in Nevada and nine in Pennsylvania — swing states where election results could be decided on extremely narrow margins where every vote counts.

The report also identified four such officials in North Carolina, three in Colorado and three in New Mexico. All of them refused to certify results in 2020.

“Free and fair elections are the bedrock of American democracy, and they are currently under serious threat,” the watchdog’s president Noah Bookbinder said in a statement accompanying the report.

“It is imperative that those with the power to ensure that election results are certified take preventative actions — and remedial actions if