Arizona House Speaker dooms bill to give legislature ability to reject election results

The GOP Arizona House Speaker effectively doomed a bill on Tuesday that would have given the legislature the ability to reject primary or general election results.

The legislation, introduced by far-right state Rep. John Fillmore, came in the wake of former President Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election in multiple states, including Arizona.

All 12 Arizona state House committees were assigned the proposal for consideration by state Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), making it nearly impossible for the legislation to be passed, Capitol Media Services reported.

“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told the news outlet, saying that he had technically not killed the bill because it had in fact been referred for consideration to House committees.

But he also expressed his opposition to the nature of measure.

“For somebody to say we have plenary authority to overthrow a vote of the people for something we think may have happened, where is [the evidence]?’’ Bowers asked.

But not all Republicans were pleased with the move, including Fillmore.

“Sometimes there are a great many of the legislators [who] don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do what is right,’’ Fillmore told Capitol Media Services. 

The Arizona state representative told The Hill that he had been willing to make concessions on the legislation previously and noted that he was now going to move on as much of the bill as possible.

“I’m not doing 1958 Jim Crow,” he argued in defense of his bill.

The doomed bill also included other components such as mandating residents to vote in their home precincts and doing away with most absentee and early voting. 

The news comes as both a GOP-led Maricopa County canvass and a Cyber Ninjas audit, conducted last year, confirmed that now-President Biden won the state’s most populous county. 

The Hill has reached out to Bowers’s office for comment.

— Updated Feb. 5 at 10:25 p.m.