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2020 Election

Arizona Officials Are Calling Bulls–t on Republicans’ 2020 Election “Audit”

The so-called “audit” of the 2020 election results that Arizona Republicans launched last spring was supposed to conclude in May. But months later, the GOP-led legislature and Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm leading the exercise, are still trying to extend it—a telltale sign that, despite all the talk about election integrity, the end goal is to further Donald Trump’s “big lie.” 

Knowing this, election officials in Maricopa county—Arizona’s largest—rejected a subpoena on Monday to turn over additional materials. “It is now August 2021,” Jack Sellers, chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, wrote in a searing letter to Senate Republicans. “The election of November 2020 is over. If you haven’t figured out that the election in Maricopa County was free, fair, and accurate yet, I’m not sure you ever will.” 

He continued: “The Board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land. Please finish whatever it is that you are doing and release whatever it is you are going to release.”

Arizona Republicans and Cyber Ninjas, whose CEO, Doug Logan, is a proponent of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims, began their sideshow review in April. The company, which had no experience auditing elections, completed a recount last month—a process that compromised voting equipment that will likely need to be replaced on taxpayers’ dime. Though the Department of Justice has warned that the GOP’s actions threaten Arizonans’ civil rights, the state’s Senate majority has persisted, demanding last week that the county turn over even more material, including its computer routers, which Trump himself has suggested would validate his fraud claims. “We want the routers!” Trump said at a rally last month in Phoenix, evincing little understanding of what a router might be. “If you got those routers, what that will show.” But county officials and Dominion Voting Systems, which has been at the center of Trumpworld conspiracy theories about the election, said Monday they would not comply with the subpoena. The election was conducted in accordance with state and federal law, Sellers wrote, and “there wasn’t an injection of ballots from Asia, nor was there a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment.”

Of course, Sellers’s admonishment is unlikely to deter Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who said Monday she is “weighing our options for securing access to the routers and passwords,” or her fellow Republicans, who are using the “audit” in their campaign to subvert democratic norms. Trump may regard the effort as the first step to realizing his fantasy of invalidating Joe Biden’s presidency—“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” he ranted to a group of Mar-a-Lago guests at the outset of the recount—but his party is far more calculating. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer made clear in her recent report on the powerful conservative money interests pushing “the big lie,” the Arizona audit is not actually about reversing the 2020 election, but undermining future elections, sowing doubt in the process and justifying the slate of disenfranchisement laws Republicans have been rushing to enact. 

Attempts in Arizona and elsewhere to re-litigate 2020 and the mass introduction of anti-voting laws can sometimes be framed as separate endeavors, but in truth they’re working in tandem, the former laying the foundation for the latter. “Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything,” Ralph Neas, who’s overseeing a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, told Mayer. “It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coordinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the presidency.”

There have been some dramatic stands against these attacks. Last month, Texas Democrats left the state to block draconian voter suppression legislation from passing, and now the Arizona board of supervisors is refusing to comply with the Republican circus, pointedly suggesting a coming legal battle. “Release your report,” Sellers wrote, “and be prepared to defend any accusations of misdeeds in court.” But until Democrats and others interested in defending democracy coalesce around a strategy to combat the relentless broadsides, the threat of Trumpism will loom large over the coming midterms.

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