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Had the case gone their way, Arizona would have seen the inauguration ofGov. Bradley James Burchfield, Phoenix Mayor Samantha Nicole Arrey and Maricopa County Sheriff Brian Steiner.

Those three were among the 20 people who filed a request with the Arizona Supreme Court that the past two general elections be invalidated and certain people who won their seats in those contests be tossed out of office. In their place, the group offered to install themselves as temporary caretakers until a proper election could be held.

The group initially filed its petition anonymously, its names under seal by its request.

However, the Arizona Supreme Court, in a Wednesday ruling, ordered the names be made public. A document was unsealed Thursday that revealed the names.

None appear to be recognizable political figures in Arizona.

Arizona Supreme Court at 1501 W. Washington St. in Phoenix.(Photo: Patrick Breen/The Republic)

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The group filed the papers under the name: We The People of the State of Arizona. But a spokesperson for the group had said that was meant as a generic description, not a proper name.

The spokesperson said this group had no affiliation with the pro-Trump political group We The People, which has also been a champion of the Arizona State Senate-ordered audit of all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County.

This group had asked for anonymity for security reasons. In its filing, it said the members understood that their names would be public should the court act on the petition and entertain installing the members into public office.

Once in office, the group argued in a motion, their public stature "would have provided a measure of safety in itself."

The Arizona Supreme Court dismissed the case three business days after it was filed. It then gave the group a deadline to file a motion explaining why the individual's names needed to be kept from public view. After receiving that motion on Monday, the court rejected the request on Wednesday and ordered the names be made available.

The group's novel petition suggested that a slew of office holders who won election in the 2018and 2020elections, as well as the 2019 Tucson mayoral election, were holding their office improperly. The group offered a novel solution: to take the place of what it called usurpers until a proper election could be held.

The claim was rooted in a truth: The federal agency charged with certifying the two companies in the United States that audit election machines had not given a by-the-book certification for years. Both were still certified under federal law as their renewals were still working through the bureaucratic process.

A spokesperson for the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by the Help America Vote Act, said both companies have continued to have staff visit and assess the machines, ensuring their testing was up to accreditation standards.

Jack Cobb, the co-founder of Pro V&V, one of the groups, told The Republic that the problem wasn't practical, but political. His company was still operating up to federal standards, he said. But the board of political appointees simply hadn't voted to renew the certification, providing a final stamp of approval.

The Arizona Supreme Court said, in its ruling, that even if the requestwastimely, it could not entertain tossing out election results absent evidence that the errors pointed out by the group would have changed the results.

"The validity of an election is not voided by honest mistakes or omissions," the court wrote in its ruling, citing a case dating back to 1887, when Arizona was still a territory.

The court also pointed out that the petitionwas, by statute, meant to be filed by a county attorney or state attorney general, or someone with a viable claim to the office.

In its ruling, the court said that "nothing in the statutes Petitioners cite grants them a private right of action to remove office holders and sit in their stead."

Elwin "Buz" Slade, a real estate agent in Tucson, who was part of the group, said he had a feeling the petition would be tossed out by the Arizona Supreme Court, continuing what he sees as a decades-long pattern of government corruption.

"Big money controls everything," Slade said during a phone interview on Thursday. "And if you have money, you get to pick who gets to be in office."

Slade, in the court filing, was contesting the seat held by Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos. Slade said he was tapped to be sheriff mainly because he looked the part. "I'm just a big guy and they said, 'You should be sheriff,'" he said.

Though as a young man he protested the Vietnam War in Tucson, Slade said the last Democrat to earn his vote was former President Jimmy Carter. He said he was active in the Tea Party movement, and held fast to his conservative beliefs even in the hostile heavily-Democratic area of Pima County in southern Arizona.

Slade said he was vocal about his politics and would talk "ad nauseum with friends until they told me they don't want to hear me."

If he were sheriff, Slade said he would have done the basics. "I would have listened to my deputies, enforced the law,"he said. "Yeah, I would have been a good sheriff."

The group asked the court to oust four statewide officeholders: Gov. Doug Ducey, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, State Treasurer Kimberly Yee and the Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman. It also sought to boot four members of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, and six state lawmakers, including the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives.

The group said it targeted as many office holders as there were members of the group willing to take their place in office. The group said it chose the offices strategically, knowing the transition would be a difficult time for the state but that having ordinary citizens in these key places would keep the state running as smoothly as possible.

The group spared Attorney General Mark Brnovich in its court case, according to Slade, because the group didn't have any lawyer who could have replaced him.

Although the same machines the group found problematic were also used for the 2020 election for U.S. President, the group did not seek redress for Arizona's electoral votes being awarded to President Joe Biden and not former President Donald Trump.

The group had filed its action with the Arizona Supreme Court anonymously, using only initials. In the filing, it included a series of documents that contained the individual members' names, dates of birth and home addresses, which the group said was intended to show all were qualified to hold public office in Arizona.

The court, in its ruling on Wednesday, ordered that a copy of those affidavits be unsealed, with the addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers redacted.

The court said that the group's concerns about security could not overcome the requirements set out in the Arizona Constitution, state statute and the rules governing the courts.

The court said that "the public's right to know the identities of Petitioners outweighs their desire to proceed anonymously."

Although the group referenced a provision in the state constitution that said no person should be disturbed in their private affairs, the court said, in its ruling that members' effort "to unseat publicly elected officeholders through this Court is not a private affair."

Two people involved with the effort have communicated with The Republic only through email, denying requests for interviews by phone.

However, both spoke on an online talk show hosted by former state legislative candidate Liz Harris, who has provided thrice daily updates on the audit ordered by the Arizona State Senate of the 2.1 million votes in Maricopa County. The interview took place on May 11, the day the state high court dismissed the case.

Daniel Wood was the 2020 Republican candidate for Congress representing District 3.(Photo: Arizona Secretary of State)

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Rayana Eldan, whose name, along with Daniel Wood, a 2020 Congressional candidate, were the only two used in the court filing, said that she started looking at the problems with the election in January or February.

"We're not contesting a county or a couple of votes here," Eldan said on the show, which has since been removed from Harris's Facebook page and made private on YouTube. "We're basically saying the entire state wasn't treated fairly and their rights were violated."

Eldan said the court's rejection of the lawsuit for not being timely did not allow for the situation at hand, with someone like herself, unversed in minutia of election law, finding a major problem through their own research weeks or months later.

"We found fraud," she said. "We found problematic things at the very top level. It's interesting the way they framed it and so easily dismissed us and told us we weren't in compliance."

Eldan described herself, through most of her life, as "kind of a hippie environmentalist. I'm not a longtime MAGA Republic person," she said, using the acronym for the Trump campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

"I'm just kind of a person who got sick of seeing my heart misappropriated by both sides," she said. "The identify politics thing."

Had the petition been successful, Eldan would have been temporarily installed as the mayor of Tucson, the state's second largest city.

Wood, who has announced his intention to campaign for Congress again in 2022, said on the show that the group came together after hearing a speech he gave at a district meeting. He described the group as ordinary citizens, not affiliated with any recognized or established group.

"This has nothing to do with any organization, has nothing to do with some kind of plan or Q," he said, referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory that imagines Trump was preparing to dismantle and arrest a global cabal of politicians and celebrities engaged in crimes against children. Wood posted about the QAnon conspiracy during the 2020 campaign and told The Republic he followed Q's writings and had found some truth in them.

Wood said that he had first learned of the certification issue in the spring of 2020, but realized the issue would have been too much for him to tackle on his own.

"In my mind," he said, "I was thinking borderline treason."

The 20 names and the seats they contested were:

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Court names the 20 people who wanted to toss Arizona elections, put themselves in office - The Arizona Republic