Draft for discussion. AI-drafted (Claude), 2026-08-08, not reviewed by any organization named here. Not for publication or sharing beyond the people discussing it. General version: November strategy.
Organize Cochise County before October: its board is pre-signaling a 2026 certification refusal.
Early-vote armor: early list + BallotTrax, "by mail out, by hand back," beat the November anti-mail-voting measure.
takeactiontucson.org stays as it is plus at most: a "what to do if" page (hotlines and rights, one screen, Spanish first) and observer trainings on the existing calendar.
What a person searching finds today
"How do I help" finds the county poll worker page, the League of Women Voters, and party volunteer pages. It does not find the election observer trainings that trained 250+ people in Phoenix and Tucson in July; those surface only in news articles.
"ICE at my polling place, what do I do" finds ACLU of Arizona know-your-rights pages and, scattered across articles, the hotlines: 866-OUR-VOTE, 1-877-THE-VOTE, and Rapid Response Tucson's 24-hour line.
Take Action Tucson is findable and is the hub: calendar, weekly gatherings, Discord.
Three rings of people
Worried, wants information. The largest ring. What is true, what do I do if I see something, who do I call. One screen, plain words, no signup.
Willing to show up. The calendar serves this ring already.
Trained responders. Recruited person to person, through the orgs, not through a website.
The unserved ring is the first. The two site additions at the top serve it; nothing else is needed on the site.
Two places effort actually lands
1. Cochise County certification, next door. Pima's board will certify. Cochise's board delayed certification in 2022 and a Pima County Superior Court judge ordered them to certify the same day, ruling the canvass is "ministerial and mandatory, not discretionary." The two supervisors were criminally charged; one pleaded guilty. The same board is now pre-signaling a 2026 rerun: supervisors held a work session on abandoning tabulation machines and hand-counting, Supervisor Frank Antenori says the county should challenge the tabulation-machine statute in court, and in March the board asked the Director of National Intelligence to investigate its 2022 machines. KJZZ is already covering what happens if Cochise refuses to certify. This is the certification chokepoint in southern Arizona, it is thin on organizers, and Tucson is the nearest base. The Georgia pre-emption model fits: public meetings before October, officials pledging on record, with the voices in the room being Cochise residents, not visitors from Tucson. One caution to verify: reporting ahead of the second supervisor's trial says a judge threw out parts of Arizona's certification rules, so what legal ground remains from 2022 needs checking with lawyers, not assuming.
2. Early-vote armor. Intimidation at polling places only reaches people who vote in person on election day. Arizona's counters exist and are strong: the Active Early Voting List (sign up any time; ballot arrives by mail automatically), BallotTrax tracking by text, and voter registration open until October 5 for the November 3 general. Both counters are under direct attack: the USPS mail-ballot executive order is in court, and a measure on this November's Arizona ballot would restrict mail voting. Moving targeted communities onto the early list and onto ballot tracking, through the messengers those communities already trust, converts election-day pressure into a non-event. This is relational work the existing orgs already know how to do; the contribution from outside is the concrete asset: AEVL signup and BallotTrax in every "what to do" one-pager, in Spanish first.
First steps, in order
Start with the people who run the existing work. Questions this draft can't answer and they can: what do people ask for that the site doesn't answer; what should stay off the web entirely; if another city copied the site tomorrow, what would they need; who else should be in this conversation.
Study takeactiontucson.org and action.cooperation.org as they are. How the calendar is fed, how people arrive, what the weekly gathering does that the site doesn't. action.cooperation.org is the space we control; anything drafted gets tried there first and offered, never installed.
Inventory the findable entry points (started above), then check each with its organization before pointing at it from anywhere.
Build the reporter list for organizers' hands, not for publication: Votebeat Arizona, Jen Fifield (now on ProPublica's voting beat), Tucson Sentinel, AZ Luminaria, Tucson Spotlight, Arizona Mirror, KJZZ Fronteras Desk. The framework's press track needs reporters briefed before November, and this list is a research task anyone can start now.
Templates: how patterns travel between communities
We maintain DemPlan, a public repo of model laws and strategic documents. Its model-law collection already shows the pattern that works: a fill-in template paired with the real ordinances cities actually passed (REIN-ICE, limiting local cooperation with ICE, with enacted examples from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago). A template travels when it ships with proof it worked somewhere, needs only local names and numbers filled in, and moves through networks that already trust each other, not through a new platform.
Election-defense templates that would fit DemPlan the same way, each one file, each paired with a working example:
Model county count-the-vote resolution. No county appears to have enacted one yet (the Minnesota teams' work was blocking hand-count resolutions, not passing affirmative ones). Building blocks: Protect Democracy's county white paper "Election Certification Is Not Optional" and the Brennan Center's certification guardrails (state-level model language). Draft below.
A "what to do if" one-pager: rights and hotlines on one screen, blanks for each community's local numbers.
A hub replication guide: how takeactiontucson.org works (calendar, weekly gathering, chat), written so another city can copy it as it is.
A non-compliance protocol card for poll workers and election staff: this is what you see, this is what you do, this is who you call.
A press pre-briefing kit: the local reporter list format and what to put in front of reporters before November, not after.
Draft: a resolution Pima County could adopt
No county has enacted a resolution like this. Pima passing one would create the first enacted example for the template, and concrete text Cochise residents could ask their own board to match. Starting draft, for lawyers to check, statute citations to be filled in:
Whereas a Pima County Superior Court ruled in 2022 that a county board's canvass of election results is "ministerial and mandatory, not discretionary";
Resolved, this Board will canvass and certify every election by the statutory deadline;
Resolved, ballots will be counted on state-certified tabulation equipment as Arizona law requires;
Resolved, the 75-foot limit at voting locations will be enforced, and county staff will follow a written protocol if law enforcement or federal agents appear at a voting or counting location;
Resolved, the County Attorney is directed to seek expedited judicial relief against any interference with voting, counting, or certification.