The Arizona Supreme Court has rejected a prosecutor's appeal to overturn a lower court's decision to send the state's fake elector case back to a grand jury. The case involves Donald Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others over the 2020 presidential election.
The ruling is a setback for Arizona's Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who has been trying to advance the case through the courts. Mayes's office stated it will present the case in full to a new grand jury rather than drop the prosecution.
This development follows similar cases in Michigan and Georgia being dismissed, and a federal case against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election being dropped by a special prosecutor in late 2024. Related fake elector cases remain active in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
A lower-court judge in Phoenix ruled in May that the first grand jury had not been shown the text of the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century law governing presidential election certification. Defence lawyers argued the law permitted multiple slates of electors to be submitted to Congress if results were disputed, though it was amended in 2022 to allow only one slate, signed off by the governor.
There has been no progress in the Arizona case at the trial court level since mid-May.
