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The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday that prosecutors cannot appeal an order sending the state’s fake elector case back to a grand jury, upholding a lower-court judge’s conclusion that the first grand jury was not properly instructed on applicable federal law.
Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said her office will again present the case in its entirety to a grand jury rather than abandon the prosecution. The five-member court’s decision leaves the door open for the case to proceed, but resets it to an earlier procedural stage after more than a year of litigation.
A lower-court judge in Phoenix concluded in May that the initial grand jury had not been shown the text of the Electoral Count Act, which governs the certification of presidential election contests. The judge’s order sent the case back for a fresh grand jury proceeding, and prosecutors appealed that ruling to the state’s highest court.
The Arizona case charges former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and others with participating in an effort to submit an alternate slate of electors loyal to Trump after he lost the state to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes in 2020.
Defense lawyers argued that the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute, allowed states to submit multiple slates of electors to Congress in the event of disputed election results. The statute was amended in 2022 to clarify that each state may put forward only one slate of electors, to be certified by the governor.
There has been no movement in the Arizona case at the trial court level since mid-May, when the lower-court judge issued the initial order sending the case back to a grand jury. The Supreme Court’s decision means prosecutors must start the grand jury phase again, though with the Electoral Count Act now before the panel.
The ruling marks the latest development in a wave of election-interference prosecutions that have faced significant legal headwinds. Similar cases in Michigan and Georgia have been dismissed by courts, and a special prosecutor dropped a federal case in late 2024 that charged Trump本人 with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results.
Fake elector-related prosecutions continue in Nevada and Wisconsin, where courts have allowed the cases to move forward, raising questions about whether disparate legal outcomes across states could shape the trajectory of any broader legal strategy targeting the 2020 election aftermath.
Mayes took office as Arizona attorney general in January 2023 and inherited the investigation from her Republican predecessor, Mark Brnovich, who died in January 2026 at age 59. Brnovich’s office had originally advanced the investigation through the FBI’s evidence-gathering phase before Mayes’ team took over prosecution.