Candidates echo bogus Arizona fraud claims for 2022

Trump himself is expected to visit Arizona this Saturday, where he seeks to assert, once again, that Arizona’s audit will be the first domino to show fraud in a series of states Biden narrowly won. , including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In this story, the truth does not simply take a back seat. He is thrown by the side of the road.

Take last week’s GOP briefing in the state capital of Arizona, where Doug Logan, prime contractor for reviewing ballots in Maricopa County, said “we have 74,243 ballots. postal vote where there is no clear record of their sending, “and 11,326 people who he said were not on the November 7 electoral roll but ran on the final voters list on December 4 .

But it didn’t matter. Within minutes, and the week that followed, Donald Trump and a host of GOP election conspirators trumpeted the supposed findings on social media as “proof” that the election was stolen. And candidates touting their loyalty to Trump were quick to tweet, re-tweet or publish Logan’s debunked claims and demand more audits.

Early on, Arizona Senate Speaker Karen Fann hired Cyber ​​Ninjas, a little-known company inexperienced in election audits, run by a man who had repeated allegations of savage conspiracy fraud; that the review be funded in complete secrecy by private, possibly partisan, sources; through the company initially handing out blue pens to listeners until a reporter points out that they could be used to change the way ballots are read to, more recently, entrepreneurs who send out Reams of voting data at a mysterious shack in Montana, in the final part of the audit, the review of votes in Arizona was loaded.

There could hardly be a deeper rift than that between how election experts view the audit and how GOP candidates backing Trump describe it.

“Was it deliberate from day one for fundraising?” Harri Hursti, founder of Nordic Innovation Labs and data security expert who recently completed a conventional election audit in New Hampshire, asked of the Arizona voting review. “This whole thing is theater… it’s smoke, mirrors and theater.” The New Hampshire audit, on the other hand, found that a folder borrowed from the town of Windham caused an incorrect count of 400 ballots, but that there was “no reason to believe that the counting errors found in Windham indicate a pattern of partisan bias or Failed Elections. ”

“If you’re a Republican concerned about this election, you shouldn’t be relying on the results of this Arizona review,” Grayson told CNN.

“Routine audits of the vote count are important,” said Mark Lindeman, acting co-director of Verified Voting, a non-partisan non-profit election integrity organization that worked earlier this year with Georgia on a full count of his votes and with Pennsylvania on a risk. limit the electoral audit. Both indicated that the original results were substantially accurate.

But in Arizona, he said, “The problem seems to be that Trump lost, and that’s what they’re trying to fix; but that’s not what audits do. He described as bizarre the procedures Cyber ​​Ninjas and the other Arizona contractors are going through, adding, “It’s a process that can only raise more questions, muddy the waters … ‘makes a lot of sense, except as a means of increasing doubt. ”

But many visiting GOP candidates and lawmakers in Arizona, who have eagerly instigated lies about the 2020 vote and adopted vicious and sweeping rhetoric about those who disagree with them, dismiss such criticism.

“I don’t care what a GOP board says; you have a lot of RINOs in positions they shouldn’t be in,” Oklahoma’s Lahmeyer said, using the term for “Republicans in name only. “. Lahmeyer, who touts his support for disgraced former general Michael Flynn, and hopes to topple GOP Senator James Lankford in 2022, called Lankford a “traitor” for voting Jan.6 to certify President Biden’s victory. As of June 30, Lahmeyer said he had raised just over $ 250,000 from the Federal Election Commission. Lankford’s FEC reports show he had raised $ 2.3 million as of that date.

Jones, the former Georgian lawmaker, called Governor Kemp a “traitor” for dismissing allegations of electoral fraud. Asked about his visit to the Arizona audit and his Georgia fraud allegations, Jones said, “It helped my campaign. From day one I spoke about things that I described as a violation. of the Constitution, the procedures followed for counting absent ballots. ” Its fundraising website specifically calls for contributions to “ensure that elections in Georgia are never stolen by Democrats again.”

Chase, the Virginia lawmaker, said she plans to push for an audit in Virginia when her legislature comes into session in August. “I think there were irregularities and an organized effort by Democrats to steal the election from President Trump, and thousands of votes were returned. There must be a forensic audit in every state,” a- she declared.

And in Arizona, where limited-term Gov. Doug Ducey will not be running for election, at least two GOP gubernatorial candidates echoed Logan’s debunked claims about electoral issues on social media.

Lindeman, of Verified Voting, sighed during a discussion of such claims and said that while election audits can always be improved, “they were better in 2020 than they have ever been.”

“There is no rational basis for the idea that something terrible happened in November 2020 and we must continue to investigate and investigate until we find it,” he said. , adding that “what has been lost is any shared national commitment to fact-finding.”