The Arizona Senate "audit" of the ballots cast in Maricopa County last November, which began on April 22 and was expected to be completed within three weeks, continues at a snail's pace. Senate liaison Ken Bennett reported yesterday that only 275,000 ballots (of 2.1 million cast) have been reviewed at this stage. The process will be suspended on Friday, as all ballots are moved from the site of the recount into storage, because the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the proceedings are taking place, will be the site of high school graduation ceremonies throughout the week. Ten days later, the ballot examiners will get back at it.
This has been a partisan charade from the beginning. First, because there isn't a shred of credible evidence of any fraud or malfeasance in the election results in the county. But after multiple recounts and unsuccessful court challenges, the Republican Senate -- unhappy with the Biden victory, the first in the county for a Democratic presidential candidate since Harry Truman -- ordered an audit of the ballots. Unfortunately, voter confidence, ballot security, and the rule of law were sacrificed for a partisan endeavor run by folks attached to the Big Lie.
Senate Republicans hired a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, with no experience counting ballots and whose owner, Doug Logan, is a conspiracy theorist, an advocate for the "Stop the Steal" movement, and the author of a document "Election Fraud Facts & Details" (which Trump attorney Sidney Powell posted on her website). Logan said that he had created the document at the behest of unnamed U.S. Senators, as the Arizona Mirror reported last month:
Among the various claims in the document is a debunked allegation that the “core software” used by Dominion originated with and is the intellectual property of Smartmatic, alleging the latter company was founded in Venezuela and has ties to Hugo Chavez, the country’s socialist dictator who died in 2013. It claims Smartmatic has been linked to election rigging in Venezuela, India and the Philippines.
The paper alleges ties between Dominion and China, and repeats a discredited claim that the private equity firm that owns Dominion sold it to a Chinese-controlled securities company. Claims of ties between Dominion and Chinese investors were largely based on confusion between the similarly named New York and China-based subsidiaries of a Swiss securities company.
. . .
The document also cites an unsubstantiated claim that Dominion official Eric Coomer told a conference call of members of the radical left-wing movement Antifa, “Don’t worry about the election, Trump is not going to win. I made f***ing sure of that.” The alleged quote originated from conservative activist Joseph Oltmann, who claimed he heard a man identified as “Eric from Dominion” make the statement during the call.
After stumbles right out of the gate, folks in the Coliseum have peered at the ballots under ultraviolet light (perhaps looking for water marks; perhaps not), subjected them to kinesthetic markers (a fancy way of saying they have examined folds in the paper, based on speculations of a failed inventor), and examined them for the presence of bamboo fibers (because of the baseless claim that 40,000 fraudulent ballots were shipped to Phoenix from China).
This is nuts. Joe Biden bested Donald Trump in the November 2020 election. The Arizona Senate's Republican majority, in thrall of wild conspiracy theories and Trump's Big Lie, has manufactured a nefarious extra-legal process to audit the ballots in Maricopa County.
In election maven Rick Hasen's words, “It would be comical if it weren't so scary.” Arizona Senate Republicans have trashed the democratic norm of abiding by the results of free and fair elections, so the winner takes office and the loser steps aside once the votes have been counted. Biden's defeat of Trump nationally wasn't even close. In state after state, we've had recounts, audits, and rejections in court of baseless challenges to the Biden victory, which still stands.
This week the Republican Arizona Senate has threatened the Maricopa County supervisors and sheriff with another lawsuit, while the Arizona Secretary of State (a critic of the shady audit) has received death threats.
The mischief in Arizona may spread. OAN, the network that's trying hard to be Trumpier than Fox, reports:
Meanwhile, Trump-era trade advisor Peter Navarro has been looking ahead to a similar audit in Georgia. He predicts an audit would likely reveal election fraud in the 2020 election just as it is in Arizona. Navarro added, the scale of voter fraud in Georgia is “much larger than in Arizona” and cited preliminary estimates.
And last week, Donald Trump concocted a new conspiracy regarding Michigan votes -- and a companion conspiracy regarding Wisconsin:
At 6:31 in the morning on November 4th, a dump of 149,772 votes came in to the State of Michigan. Biden received 96% of those votes and the State miraculously went to him. Has the Michigan State Senate started their review of the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 yet, or are they about to start? If not, they should be run out of office. Likewise, at 3:42 in the morning, a dump of 143,379 votes came in to the state of Wisconsin, also miraculously, given to Biden.
Will Republicans multiply the Arizona travesty in state after state across the county (as voter-suppression measures have hopscotched from one state to another)? Who knows? In any case, election audits six months after the fact would hardly be the most grievous harm to democratic governance founded on the Big Lie.
Much more threatening: the precedent of rejecting the outcome of an election that Republicans lose. Next time, in another election cycle, Republican-controlled legislatures (if the vote is close enough) may simply overrule voting majorities and overturn elections that they lose -- before the results have been certified and the Democratic winners have taken office.
A year ago most of us would have regarded that prospect as farfetched. However, after watching Republicans at the national, state, and local level since November 3, and especially since January 6, this scenario is undeniably well-founded. In Arizona the state legislature has willingly trampled on the prerogatives of election officials; in Georgia the legislature has stripped a secretary of state (who stood up to Trump and against the Big Lie) of authority in future elections. The deluge of voter suppression legislation -- which has reached 11 states thus far -- is evidence of Republican legislatures' mistrust of established, heretofore unchallenged, democratic rules.
Whether invested in conspiracy theories, fearful of the backlash for opposing Republican voters or other Republicans in office, or committed to advancing their power whatever the means whenever they can get away with it -- Republican elected officials, since January 6, have been highly reluctant to shut the door on the Big Lie, and more than willing to deny the legitimacy of an election outcome that their leader lost.
We saw a number of profiles in courage, as Republican election officials did the right thing this past November. Those Republicans are likely to be purged or overruled the next time. The Republican Party (in surveys among voters and through legislative actions) has chosen to join Donald Trump in rejecting democratic institutions if that means Republicans lose power.
The GOP has become a threat to our democracy.