Appeals court deals final blow to GOP’s elections rulebook challenge

On Dec. 5, the Arizona Court of Appeals dismissed a legal challenge to the state’s 2023 Election Procedures Manual that had been brought by the Republican National Committee, the Arizona Republican Party and the Yavapai County Republican Party.

Every two years, the secretary of state is tasked with creating a new EPM, outlining procedures and rules for county elections officials to implement state election laws when they conduct elections in the state. The manual carries the force of law, and must be approved by the governor and attorney general — offices both currently held by Democrats — before it’s published.

Republicans heavily criticized the 2023 manual and the not-yet-finalized 2025 version. They said that multiple guidelines and rules added by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, conflicted with state law. In February 2024 when they filed the lawsuit, the RNC said that the 2023 EPM was “designed to undermine election integrity in Arizona.”

Fontes deleted some portions of the 2023 EPM from the 2025 version in response to other court cases that challenged or blocked those provisions.

In May 2024, a trial court dismissed the RNC’s arguments that Fontes violated the Administrative Procedures Act in creating the 2023 EPM by allowing only 15 days for public comment instead of 30, concluding that the Administrative Procedures Act didn’t apply to the EPM. The RNC appealed that decision, and in March 2025, the Court of Appeals overturned it.

In response to that decision, Fontes allowed 30 days of public comment on changes to the 2025 version of the EPM, although he maintained that it wasn’t legally necessary to do so because the Administrative Procedures Act doesn’t apply to the EPM.

Fontes appealed the March decision, and the Arizona Supreme Court overturned it in October, agreeing that the Administrative Procedures Act didn’t apply to the creation of the EPM.

The high court sent the case back to the Court of Appeals to determine whether any of the eight specific EPM provisions that the RNC challenged in the suit violated state law.

On Dec. 5, the Court of Appeals ruled that the RNC, AZGOP and Yavapai County Republican Party didn’t have legal standing to challenge the EPM provisions because they couldn’t point to specific, concrete harms that the provisions caused them.

“Here, the RNC has failed to explain how the challenged EPM provisions ‘make the competitive landscape worse’ for it or its candidates than it would be without the provisions,” Judge Lacey Stover Gard wrote in the unanimous decision. She was joined by Chief Judge Christopher Staring and Judge Christopher O’Neil.

The court found that, even if the provisions were found to conflict with state law, “they apply equally to all candidates and parties and do not disadvantage the RNC or its candidates in particular.”

Some of the provisions the Republicans challenged are:

• changes to give a registered voter who identified themselves as a noncitizen in a juror questionnaire a notice before revoking their voter registration.
• permitting “federal only” voters who haven’t proven their citizenship to vote in presidential elections.
• allowing those same “federal only” voters to receive a ballot by mail.
• guidance to county recorders saying that they have no obligation to check government databases to check if the information for newly registered voters aligns with information in those databases;
• the restriction of voter signatures from public view for certain purposes.
• the ability of voters to have early ballots sent to addresses outside of Arizona.
• restrictions on the timeline for challenging ballots.

The court found that several of the challenged provisions don’t “directly implicate the RNC’s interests.”

The appellate judges also were not swayed by the RNC’s argument that the challenged provisions could force it to spend money unnecessarily

“(T)he challenged provisions, for the most part, govern the duties and obligations of county recorders and other elections officials but do not impose affirmative obligations on the RNC,” Gard wrote.

Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, both Republicans, have already threatened to challenge portions of the 2025 EPM in court. The draft is currently under review and won’t be finalized until the end of December.

The Arizona Republican Party has accepted its loss in the case, with less than a month left before the new version of the EPM is set to be adopted.

“It is our hope that the SOS provide meaningful opportunity for the public and the political parties to provide feedback on the draft manual going forward,” AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda told the Arizona Mirror. “In 2025, the secretary provided a viable window to do so, in 2023 he did not. The best way to avoid litigation after the fact is to have meaningful engagement before codifying the EPM into law.”

Fontes did not respond to a request for comment.