“Our state has become a laughingstock. Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”
May 17, 2021 letter from Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to the President of the Arizona State Senate
The charade in Maricopa County continues. Jack Sellers, Chair of the Board of Supervisors (four out of five who are Republicans), has called it “a grift disguised as an audit.” The letter the supervisors sent to Karen Fann, President of the Arizona Senate, reveals the rank incompetence of the “auditors” (scare-quotes around that word appear throughout their letter) and the bad faith of the state senate. The county conducted a hand count, and audited their elections equipment, months ago. All legal challenges to the election results have been dismissed as baseless. Even the IT firm, Wake TSI, touted as having the expertise to conduct the audit has had enough, packing up and going back to Pennsylvania.
As I noted in an earlier post:
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).
Kaleigh Rogers observes that what's going on at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum has veered from any semblance of a recount or audit as required by law:
State laws stipulate that vote audits must be transparent and include more than one political party. They must also be conducted under the supervision of election officials, and the results must be made public. Forensic audits — where the systems and machines used for recording and tabulating votes are checked to make sure they’re operating properly — include even more guardrails. A handful of U.S. firms are certified by the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to do these kinds of checks, a process that requires the firms themselves to be audited every two years by the EAC, according to Jack Cobb, the laboratory director and co-founder of Pro V&V, an EAC-accredited firm that tests voting systems. Cobb personally performed Maricopa County’s forensic audit in February, which involved running a known deck of test ballots through machines to ensure they were tabulated accurately and combing through operating system logs to ensure the machines were never connected to the internet.
You'd think this spectacle would serve as a cautionary tale for other jurisdictions. Nope. This grift has become more of a template for Republicans across the country.
Georgia
“Aided by a treasure hunter, the tea party and an unshakable belief that the presidential election was rigged, a group of skeptics may soon inspect Georgia absentee ballots in an attempt to find counterfeits.
The court-ordered review is the latest attempt to question results that have repeatedly withstood scrutiny, with no evidence of widespread fraud. Georgia election officials counted ballots three times, audited voter signatures, opened dozens of investigations and certified Democrat Joe Biden’s 12,000-vote win over Republican Donald Trump.”
Michigan
"Cheboygan County is the latest northern Michigan county to begin discussions on how they conducted their elections in November 2020.
Now, a Detroit-based lawyer is offering to conduct a forensic audit of the county's Dominion voting machines free of charge."
Wisconsin
"Assembly Speaker Robin Vos this week said he was hiring three retired police investigators to look into the election results. On Thursday, during an interview with conservative talk radio host Dan O’Donnell, Vos confirmed that one of those he hired is Mike Sandvick, a retired Milwaukee police detective.
'In all honesty, he has Republican leanings," Vos told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday . . ."
Attention is on Texas now as Republican-controlled legislatures in state after state seek to one-up each other creating obstacles to voting and even add criminal penalties for mistakes. The Brennan Center has identified 14 states as of May 14 that have passed laws to restrict access to the vote. But it is becoming increasingly clear that interference by legislatures after votes have been cast (as illustrated by the farce in Arizona) is the more ominous threat to democracy.
As Rick Hasen, legal expert on voting rights, told NPR this afternoon when asked about voter suppression:
I think you have to realize that there are two different issues going on at once. One is voter suppression, making it harder for people to register and vote. But perhaps an even bigger danger is the danger of election subversion, the idea that we might make it easier for partisans to mess with how votes are counted and how election winners are declared. That's really the No. 1 thing on the agenda for 2022 and 2024.
When Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs expressed "grave concerns" about the slapdash way the "audit" in Maricopa County was being conducted, the Arizona House Appropriations Committee stripped her of authority to defend election lawsuits.
In Georgia, the legislature restricted the authority of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (who rebuffed Trump's demand that he find 11,780 additional votes and throw the election to the loser) and made it easier for the legislature to sideline local elections officials if it didn't like the way the count was going. In Iowa, the legislature also grabbed power from local officials and added criminal penalties for violations and fines of up to $10,000 for "technical infractions."
The Constitution empowers the states to appoint presidential electors. As Mark Joseph Stern has observed, in Bush v. Gore, the 5-4 Republican majority held that while every state legislature has granted voters the power to cast votes for president (and thus determine which candidate will receive the state's electoral votes), state legislatures can take this back. In Stern's words:
Suppose, after all the votes had been cast and counted, that the state legislature in Georgia (or Arizona, or Texas, or anywhere else) decided to overrule the majority of the state's voters: that would not count (per the Bush v. Gore majority) as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. State's rights trumped voters' rights for the five Republicans who decided to throw the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
Could this subversion of democracy come to pass? Election law expert Nate Persily is uncertain, but he sees an increasing number of state legislatures willing to invoke their Constitutional powers to intervene in elections.
“If this practice becomes routine or institutionalized, then it converts elections into advisory exercises that legislatures can take or leave as they choose,” he said. “It undermines the central function of elections as the critical stage when consent of the governed is expressed. We do not know what impact these laws will have. In fact, we will only know once it is too late.”