Republican election denier expelled from Arizona house

Liz Harris, an election-denying Republican lawmaker in the Arizona house of representatives, was expelled by her colleagues on Wednesday after she invited to a committee hearing a conspiracy theorist who accused elected officials of unproven corruption and bribery.

Republican and Democratic representatives joined together to expel Harris with a 46-13 vote. An expulsion requires a two-thirds vote of the chamber and is rare. The last expulsion from the Arizona legislature was in 2018, though before that, the most recent was in 1991.

Harris invited a woman to present at a joint elections hearing hosted by the Arizona house and senate in late February who shared unvetted allegations that various elected officials had illegally received bribes from drug cartels as part of an elaborate money-laundering and property-deed scheme. Among those accused by Jacqueline Breger, a local insurance agent with no elections expertise, included Governor Katie Hobbs and other state lawmakers such as the house speaker, Ben Toma.

Before she joined the legislature, Harris gained notoriety for her involvement in election denialism. After the 2020 election, she led an unsanctioned canvass of voters, which was then debunked by elections experts. When Hobbs, a Democrat, won the governorship in November, Harris said she would not vote for anything unless there was a revote of the 2022 election.

The joint elections hearing came after Harris voted against a Republican-led budget plan, and Republican leaders allowed the hearing as a way to get Harris to change her vote on the budget.

Harris had told the ethics committee she was not aware of what Breger would present to the elections hearing, but the committee received a batch of text messages from an anonymous source that contradicted that claim. The committee found Harris knew of the bribery claims ahead of the hearing and did not comply with internal deadlines to show any presentations to House leaders, which could have flagged the presentation as out of bounds.