Arizona's highest court has denied a prosecutor's attempt to salvage the state's fake elector case against Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and others, a ruling that forces the prosecution back to square one and raises fresh doubts about whether Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes can ever bring the case to trial.

The Arizona Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a lower-court order that sent the case back to a grand jury. The decision stems from a Phoenix judge's finding that the original grand jury was never shown the text of the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century federal law at the center of the defense's argument.

For Mayes, the ruling is the latest in a string of setbacks. Her office now says it will present the case "in its entirety" to a new grand jury rather than drop the prosecution. But the case has stalled at the trial-court level since mid-May, and the legal terrain has shifted dramatically since the charges were first brought.

The grand jury problem

The case centers on the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden carried Arizona by 10,457 votes. Prosecutors allege that Meadows, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, Giuliani, and others participated in a scheme to submit an alternate slate of electors to Congress.

Defense lawyers argued that the Electoral Count Act allowed multiple slates of electors to be submitted when results were disputed. A lower-court judge in Phoenix concluded in May that the first grand jury had never been shown the actual text of that law, a gap the judge found significant enough to send the entire case back for a new grand jury proceeding.

Mayes's office appealed that order. The Arizona Supreme Court's denial of that appeal means the lower court's ruling stands, and the prosecution must start the grand jury process over, as The Guardian reported.

The Electoral Count Act itself has been a moving target. Congress amended the law in 2022 to specify that a state could put forward only one slate of electors and that the governor would sign off on it. That amendment underscores a point the defense has pressed: at the time of the alleged conduct in 2020, the statute's language was ambiguous enough to support competing interpretations.

A pattern of collapse

Arizona is not the only state where fake elector prosecutions have run aground. Similar cases in Michigan and Georgia were dismissed by the courts. Cases remain pending in Nevada and Wisconsin, but the broader legal campaign has lost considerable momentum.

At the federal level, a special prosecutor dropped a case in late 2024 that had charged Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. That decision removed the highest-profile prosecution from the board entirely.

The collapse of these cases fits a wider pattern that conservative lawmakers have flagged for years. Senate Republicans have pushed back hard against what they describe as the political weaponization of the justice system, arguing that prosecutors have stretched legal theories to target political opponents.

Whether or not one agrees with every element of that critique, the courtroom results speak for themselves. Grand jury failures, dismissed indictments, and appellate losses have dogged these prosecutions from the start.

Mayes presses on, but to what end?

Mayes's office insists the prosecution is not over. The attorney general's team says it will take the case back to a grand jury and present it fresh. But the practical obstacles are steep.

The case has seen no movement at the trial-court level since mid-May. Witnesses age. Memories fade. Political conditions shift. And the legal foundation, the pre-2022 Electoral Count Act, has already been rewritten by Congress, making the prosecution's theory harder to sell to a new panel of citizens asked to evaluate conduct that predates the amendment.

Meanwhile, the broader legal landscape around 2020 election disputes continues to evolve. A federal judge recently allowed the Trump DOJ to retain 2020 election ballots seized from Fulton County, Georgia, a ruling that signals ongoing federal interest in the integrity questions that animated the original disputes.

And Acting Attorney General Blanche has stated publicly that the DOJ possesses significant evidence regarding the 2020 election. Blanche has promised public disclosure of that evidence, a development that could reframe the entire narrative around the prosecutions that followed.

The Electoral Count Act gap

The Phoenix judge's finding, that the grand jury never saw the text of the Electoral Count Act, is more than a procedural hiccup. It goes to the heart of the case.

The defense argument rests on the proposition that the pre-2022 version of the law permitted competing slates of electors when an election's outcome was contested. If grand jurors were never shown the statute, they could not meaningfully evaluate whether the defendants' actions violated it.

That is not a technicality. It is a due process question. Grand juries exist to screen out weak cases before the government drags citizens through the expense and reputational damage of a trial. When prosecutors fail to present the very law at issue, the screening function breaks down.

Congress itself seemed to acknowledge the ambiguity when it amended the Electoral Count Act in 2022. The new language explicitly limits states to a single slate of electors and assigns sign-off authority to the governor. If the old law had been as clear as prosecutors now claim, the amendment would have been unnecessary.

Election-law fights have only intensified since then. Virginia's governor recently signed a bill to hand the state's electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from conservatives who see it as an end-run around the constitutional framework.

What comes next

Mayes now faces a choice that is as much political as legal. She can empanel a new grand jury, present the full case including the Electoral Count Act text, and hope for a fresh indictment. Or she can let the case quietly expire.

The political incentives cut one way. Mayes is a Democratic attorney general in a state that has become a national battleground. Dropping the case would invite criticism from her base. Pressing forward keeps the prosecution alive, at least on paper, even if the odds of a conviction have dimmed considerably.

But courts are not campaign stages. The Arizona Supreme Court's refusal to intervene on the prosecution's behalf is a clear signal that the judiciary sees problems with how this case has been handled. Judges in multiple states have now rejected or undermined the legal theories underpinning fake elector prosecutions.

The defendants, including Meadows and Giuliani, remain in legal limbo. High-profile legal battles involving Trump allies continue to work through the courts on multiple fronts, but the Arizona case now looks like one of the weakest entries in the lineup.

Five years after the 2020 election, with the federal case dropped, the Michigan and Georgia cases dismissed, and Arizona's prosecution sent back to the drawing board, the scorecard is hard to ignore.

Prosecutors who promised accountability have delivered delay, procedural failure, and a growing pile of judicial rebukes. At some point, the persistence stops looking like principle and starts looking like refusal to accept the answer the courts keep giving.