It’s time for Sen. Fann and her ninja auditors to release the Kraken and show us the fraud

Senate President Karen Fann may be the person who pumps out subpoenas but she got served on Monday.

The Republican-run Maricopa County Board of Supervisors brushed off her latest demand for election materials in her ongoing, unending search for evidence of a stolen election.

“The board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land,” Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers wrote, in a letter to Arizona’s Republican senators. “Please finish whatever it is you are doing and release whatever it is you are going to release. I am confident that our staff and volunteers ran the election as prescribed by federal and state law.

“There was no fraud. There wasn’t an injection of ballots from Asia nor was there a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment. It’s time for all elected officials to tell the truth and stop encouraging conspiracies.”

“Release your report and be prepared to defend any accusations of misdeeds in court.”

Does Fann still have enough Senate support?

That’s something that should get Fann’s knees to knocking.

Her conspiracy-minded auditors have amassed quite a track record for making bogus accusations, arising from not knowing what the heck they are doing. (See: the supposedly deleted database that magically reappeared once the county told the auditors how to find it. See: the 74,000 supposedly suspicious early ballots that weren’t suspicious to anyone who knows how the county runs elections.)

Still, don’t look for Fann to back down. From the start, she has run with the conspiracy crowd within her 16-member Republican caucus – not, I suspect, because she buys their wild theories but because she needs their support to continue as Senate president.

Yet if Fann were to have to put her latest showdown to a Senate vote, she’d likely lose.

Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Peoria, has called the audit “embarrassing”.

“It makes us look like idiots,” Boyer told The New York Times in May. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, has said she no longer supports the audit.

“Sadly, it’s now become clear that the audit has been botched,” she tweeted in late July. “The total lack of competence by (Fann) over the last 5 months has deprived the voters of Arizona a comprehensive accounting of the 2020 election.”

Fann already has most of what auditors want

Still, Fann and Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen slog on. We are now into Month Five of what was supposed to be a 60-day audit, looking for something, anything to prove fraud.

The ballots have been 5G photographed and UV lit. They’ve been weighed and measured and microscopically tested for bamboo. The county’s tabulation machinery has been in a back room at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the ninjas have done God-knows-what to the equipment.

And still Fann and her auditors are demanding more information, most of which the county says the auditors either already have or can easily get through public records requests the Senate already has made.

As for Fann’s renewed request for the county’s routers, that’s a still hard no. The county referred Fann (again) to the two independent audits that confirmed the equipment was not connected to the internet.

Due to Fann’s folly, the county already is spending $2.8 million to replace the voting machines turned over to the auditors. The supervisors are drawing the line at handing over the county’s routers, noting the auditors already have what “anyone with sufficient knowledge and understanding of elections” needs to assess whether the equipment was connected to the internet.

“Providing these routers puts sensitive, confidential data belonging to Maricopa County citizens – including social security numbers and protected health information – at risk,” Deputy County Attorney Tom Liddy wrote, in response to Fann’s subpoena. “Further, the Maricopa County sheriff has explained that the production of the routers would render MCSO internal law enforcement communication infrastructure extremely vulnerable to hackers, be they criminal cartels, terrorists or foreign powers … The dismantling of the County’s routers would also severely disrupt County operations and would cost the County millions of dollars.”

If there’s actual evidence, pony it up

Look for state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, Rep. Mark Finchem and the rest of the Stop the Steal crowd to launch into the familiar “What are they hiding?” routine.

Rogers, predictably, is already calling for handcuffs (again). 

Of course, it would take a vote of the Senate to hold the supervisors in contempt, which would require that the Senate be called into a special session and once called, willing to give into such nuttiness.  

Look for Fann, instead, to sue the county because really, she can’t back down now.

… And yes, look for the taxpayers to foot the bill for this continued coast-to-coast exercise in embarrassment.

The county is right to be the adult in the room and try to summon Fann back from the realm of make-believe.

Fann and her auditors have had four months to find all of the promised evidence that the election was stolen.

It’s time now to put up or … you know.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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