Half a Year After Trump’s Defeat, Arizona
Republicans Are Recounting the Vote
An audit of the vote in Arizona’s most populous county
was meant to mollify angry Trump voters. But it is being criticized as a
partisan exercise more than a fact-finding one.
By Michael
Wines
April 25,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/us/Election-audit-Arizona-Republicans.html?searchResultPosition=2
PHOENIX — It
seemed so simple back in December.
Responding
to angry voters who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a
stolen election, Arizona Republicans promised a detailed review of the vote
that showed Mr. Trump to have been the first Republican presidential nominee to
lose the state since 1996. “We hold an audit,” State Senator Eddie Farnsworth
said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “And then we can put this to rest.”
But when a
parade of flatbed trucks last week hauled boxes of voting equipment and 78
pallets containing the 2.1 million ballots of Arizona’s largest county to a
decrepit local coliseum, it kicked off a seat-of-the-pants audit process that
seemed more likely to amplify Republican grievances than to put them to rest.
Almost half
a year after the election Mr. Trump lost, the promised audit has become a snipe
hunt for skulduggery that has spanned a court battle, death threats and calls
to arrest the elected leadership of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.
The head of
Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm that Republican senators hired to oversee
the audit, has embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories of election theft and has
suggested, contrary to available evidence, that Mr. Trump actually won Arizona
by 200,000 votes. The pro-Trump cable channel One America News Network has
started a fund-raiser to finance the venture and has been named one of the
nonpartisan observers that will keep the audit on the straight and narrow.
In fact,
three previous reviews showed no sign of significant fraud or any reason to
doubt President Biden’s victory. But the senators now plan to recount — by hand
— all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire
vote statewide.
Critics in
both parties charge that an effort that began as a way to placate angry Trump
voters has become a political embarrassment and another blow to the
once-inviolable democratic norm that losers and winners alike honor the results
of elections.
“You know
the dog that caught the car?” said Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the
Republican-dominated Maricopa Board of Supervisors. “The dog doesn’t know what
to do with it.”
After a
brief pause on Friday ordered by a state court judge, the audit continues
without clarity on who will do the counting, what it will cost and who will pay
for the process, which is expected to last into mid-May. The One America
network is livestreaming it, and Mr. Trump is cheering from the sidelines.
In an email
statement on Saturday, he praised the “brave American Patriots” behind the
effort and demanded that Gov. Doug Ducey, a frequent target of his displeasure,
dispatch the state police or National Guard for their protection.
“My concern
grows deeper by the hour,” she said in an email on Friday. “It is clear that no
one involved in this process knows what they are doing, and they are making it
up as they go along.”
The Senate
president, Karen Fann, said in December that the audit had no hidden agenda and
could not change the settled election results in Arizona, regardless of what it
showed.
“A lot of
our constituents have a lot of questions about how the voting, the electoral
system works, the security of it, the validity of it,” she said, and so the
senators needed experts to examine voting processes and determine “what else
could we do to verify the votes were correct and accurate.”
Other state
legislatures have looked into bogus claims of election fraud. But the Arizona
audit, driven in part by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, is
in a league of its own. Experts say it underscores the sharp rightward shift of
the Legislature and the state Republican Party even as the state edges toward
the political center.
“I get why
they’re doing it, because half of the G.O.P. believes there was widespread
fraud,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix pollster who got his start in Republican
politics. “The only problem is, a majority of the electorate doesn’t believe
there was widespread fraud.
“The longer
they push this,” he said, “the more they’re alienating people in the middle.”
In Arizona,
the state party is headed by Kelli Ward, a former state senator who has
rejected Mr. Biden’s victory and supports the audit. Under her leadership, the
party in January censured Mr. Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain
for being insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump.
The 16
Republicans in the State Senate reflect the party’s lurch to the right.
November’s elections ousted the Senate’s two most moderate Republicans,
replacing one with a Democrat and another with a Republican who claims lifetime
membership in the Oath Keepers, the extremist group that helped lead the
assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Another
self-proclaimed Oath Keeper, State Representative Mark Finchem, proposed in January
to give the Legislature the power to reject presidential election results and
choose new electors by a majority vote.
(The proposal went nowhere). Mr. Finchem since has become a vocal backer
of the audit.
“The people
in the Legislature are more prone to believe in the conspiracy theories and are
more prone to espouse them” than in the past, said Barrett Marson, a Phoenix
campaign consultant and a former Republican spokesman for the Arizona State
House.
Ms. Fann,
Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for interviews.
The
Senate’s rightward drift is simply explained, political analysts say. Most of
the 30 Senate districts are so uncompetitive that the Democratic and Republican
primaries effectively choose who will serve as senators. Because most voters
sit out primary elections, the ones who do show up — for Republicans, that
often means far-right Trump supporters — are the key to getting elected.
Responding
to stolen-election claims, through tougher voting laws or inquiries, is by far
those voters’ top issue, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican campaign strategist
in Phoenix.
“They’re
representing their constituency,” he said. “The whole process was built to
produce this.”
The senators
warmed to the notion of a Maricopa County audit from the first mention of it in
early December.
Before
long, they sent subpoenas to the county seeking the 2.1 million ballots, access
to 385 voting machines and other equipment like check-in poll books, voting
machine passwords and personal details on everyone who voted. The supervisors
resisted, calling the election fraud-free, and said they wanted a court ruling
on the subpoenas’ legality.
The
reaction was immediate: The four Republicans and one Democrat on the Board of
Supervisors were deluged with thousands of telephone calls and emails from
Trump supporters, many from out of state, some promising violence.
“All five
supervisors were receiving death threats,” said Mr. Gallardo, the Democratic
supervisor. Two police officers were posted outside his home.
Hoping to
head off a dispute, the supervisors hired two federally approved firms to
conduct a forensic audit of the county’s voting machines. The audit concluded
that the equipment had performed flawlessly.
Ms. Fann,
who in the past had been seen as a moderate conservative, said the Senate
wanted a stricter review. Senators said they had hired “an independent,
qualified forensic auditing firm” for the task.
Then it
developed that their selection, Allied Security Operations Group, had asserted
that Arizona voting machines had been hacked in an “insidious and egregious
ploy” to elect Mr. Biden.
The
senators backtracked, but Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County
supervisors, charged in a Facebook post that they had chosen “a debunked
conspiracy theorist” for the audit.
Tempers
flared, and all 16 Republican senators proposed to hold the supervisors in
contempt, potentially sending them to jail.
But that
fell apart after Senator Paul Boyer, a Phoenix Republican, backed out after
deciding he could not jail the supervisors for disobeying a subpoena they
considered illegal.
As he stood
on the Senate floor explaining his stance, his cellphone began buzzing with
furious texts and emails. Some were threatening; some mentioned his wife’s
workplace and their toddler son.
“It was
like, ‘You’d better watch your back — we’re coming for you,’” Mr. Boyer said.
The family spent days in hiding before returning home with a 24-hour police
guard.
Just two
weeks later, on Feb. 27, a county court ruled the Senate subpoenas legal.
The Senate,
seemingly caught unawares, initially refused to accept delivery of the
subpoenaed material for lack of a secure place to store it. Officials rented a
local coliseum, but the county sheriff’s office refused to provide security,
calling the job outside its scope.
The second
firm hired to analyze the audit results, Cyber Ninjas, says it is an industry
leader. But The Arizona Republic soon reported that the company’s chief
executive, Doug Logan, had posted a litany of stolen-election conspiracy
theories on a Twitter account that he had deleted in January.
Among them
was a retweeted post suggesting that Dominion Voting Systems, a favorite target
of the right, had robbed Mr. Trump of 200,000 votes in Arizona. Dominion says
Cyber Ninjas is “led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters who have
helped spread the “Big Lie” of a rigged election.
Mr. Logan,
at a news conference last week said the company was committed to a fair,
transparent process. “It’s really, really important to us that we have
integrity in the way we do this count and in the results that come out of it,”
he told reporters.
Ms. Fann
has said that the firm and others it will oversee are “well qualified and well
experienced.”
But unease
about the audit has continued to mushroom. Ms. Hobbs, the secretary of state,
asked the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to investigate
the Senate’s handling of the procedure, citing a lack of transparency about
security of ballots. She noted that some of the Legislature’s furthest-right firebrands
have had free access to the coliseum even as it remained unclear whether
reporters and impartial election experts would be allowed to observe the
proceedings.
He
declined.
Greg
Burton, the executive editor of The Arizona Republic, said in a statement on
Friday that “Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed
Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists.”
Amid the
growing uproar, the Republican senators who have approved and stood behind the
audit since its beginning have largely been silent about concerns over its
integrity.
Alain
Delaquérière and Susan Beachy contributed research.
Michael
Wines writes about voting and other election-related issues. Since joining The
Times in 1988, he has covered the Justice Department, the White House,
Congress, Russia, southern Africa, China and various other topics. @miwine
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