The Otero County Commission voted 2-1, with one of the central figures in the refusal to certify the results, Commissioner Couy Griffin, voting “no.”
“Honestly, we have no choice,” said Commission President Vickie Marquardt before the vote, citing the possibility of fines and dismissal if the panel ignored a state Supreme Court order to certify primary results .
Griffin, who was convicted earlier Friday in Washington, DC, of his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, convened the meeting and said his “feeling and intuition” told him who opposed the measure. He also criticized what he called “the excess of state government.” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, had successfully applied for an order from the state Supreme Court this week to force certification. The All-Republican committee on Monday had refused to certify the results, citing concerns about Dominion’s voting machines and questions about a handful of individual votes in this month’s primaries.
Friday marked the deadline for New Mexico counties to certify the results.
“I am relieved that the Otero County Commission has finally done the right thing and has followed its duty under New Mexico law to certify the free and fair results of the 2022 primary election,” Oliver said in a statement. “Otero County voters and candidates who duly won their primaries can now be confident that their voices have been heard and that the general election can proceed as planned.”
The confrontation in New Mexico had raised alarm among voting rights advocates across the country, who feared that the commissioners’ initial actions would mark a preview of the upcoming disruptions, as denied conspiracy theories advanced by former President Donald Trump and his allies were seizing parts of the country. the country.
“This is the canary of the coal mine for 2022 and 20224,” said Jonathan Diaz, a senior legal adviser for the voting rights at the Non-Partisan Campaign Legal Center, on the delay in county certification. Knoll. “I think it reflects the pernicious nature of the election lies that the former president and his allies were spreading after those elections and continue to spread today.”
This week, Oliver also filed a criminal complaint against the state’s attorney general, calling for a commission investigation into what he called “multiple illegal actions,” including the initial refusal to certify the results of the primaries and the vote to remove ballot boxes. .
Marquardt told a large courtroom on Friday that Oliver, the state Supreme Court, the state legislature and Attorney General Hector Balderas, a Democrat, “are leading this commission to approving the rubber stamp under the ‘threat of criminal charges and imprisonment’.
“I will be of no use to residents of Otero County from prison or if I am removed from office,” he added.
In a press release on Thursday, Marquardt said he did not intend to reconsider the 2020 election, but that he had specific concerns about the certification of the state’s voting system and about three votes allegedly “cast from one address. where the people who live there have died. ” At Friday’s meeting, he said his questions about those votes had been addressed by county election officials.
Griffin, who had been convicted in March of a felony release, avoided jail time on Friday and was sentenced to 14 days with a full term, a $ 3,000 fine and a year of supervised release with the requirement of complete 60 hours of community service.
Griffin, who co-founded Cowboys for Trump, had taken a defiant tone outside the Washington courtroom Friday earlier, saying Oliver’s criminal derivation “says a lot about New Mexico’s political vindication today.”
Just over 7,300 voters in Otero County voted in this month’s primary, according to the secretary of state. Trump easily won the Republican stronghold in 2020.
But officials in southern New Mexico County of about 68,000 people have previously faced scrutiny over their election-related conduct.
The commission earlier this year authorized a third-party review of the county’s 2020 election results. It included a door-to-door “audit force” to question voters, prompting the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee to launch an investigation. A resolution agreement between the county and a company it had hired to conduct the review concluded that “No election fraud had been found.”
Diaz, of the Campaign Legal Center, said it was “a reassuring sign” that the New Mexico Supreme Court had come forward so quickly to force certification. He said he hoped it would “serve as a warning to other county boards and people involved in the election application and certification process that this is not acceptable and the votes of the northern people cannot be invalidated.” American “.
This story was updated with additional reports on Friday.
CNN’s Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.