Arizona’s election results were certified on January 6, of course, and there were numerous legal challenges in Maricopa County, none of which concluded that county election officials committed any wrongdoing. Six months after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes of the 3.3 million ballots that were cast statewide in the November election, rogue GOP officials continue to propagate baseless accusations of fraud despite the fact that local election officials took pains to ensure that the county tabulated votes correctly.
Immediately following the November election, Maricopa County election officials oversaw a hand-count of a statistically significant sampling of ballots—47,000 votes—that were cast by county residents and tabulated by Dominion Voting Systems, the election company the county has used since 1998. The results from the first hand-count—which was staffed by volunteers from the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties—were 100 percent identical to the initial total tabulated on Dominion’s voting machines.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors then hired two additional elections companies to conduct a forensic audit of the Dominion voting software. The companies concluded that the installed software was certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Arizona secretary of state and that there was no malware connected to the machines. Neither company found any evidence to suggest the software was connected to the internet or that any votes were switched from one candidate to another.
Arizona State Senate Republicans still weren’t convinced. Under the leadership of Senate President Karen Fann, they ordered a so-called forensic audit contesting the victories of Joe Biden and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. The Republican-led audit began on April 23 after a judge granted Fann’s subpoenas for ballots and other election materials.
[Former Arizona Republican Party chair Randy] Pullen claims that the recount will be completed by the end of June. As of Wednesday, more than 1.7 million of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have reportedly been counted.
The partisan operation has been criticized by Democrats and Republican election officials in Arizona for its lack of transparency and its failure to adhere to state election rules. Audit organizers also aren’t being shy about their long-term goals. “What will come out of this is the entire process for how you do this large of an audit will be written up,” Pullen said. “It will be a plan that someone else can take and use as the basis for doing something similar to this.”
The idea is already gaining traction among rogue Republicans in swing states. Three members of the Pennsylvania Senate toured Maricopa County’s election site Wednesday and told reporters they plan to launch a similar audit in their own state.
In many ways, the audit can best be summarized by one word: “dominoes.” Arizona GOP leaders are hoping this Maricopa County audit will launch similar undertakings nationwide. “Arizona is the first domino that will fall, and then other states will look into irregularities, abnormalities, mistakes and potentially outright fraud that happened in their states as well,” state Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward said on Newsmax on May 1.
Ward, who previously served in the Arizona Senate, has spent months cheering on the audit and stoking baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Dominion improperly influencing the November election.* On December 28, a lawyer for Dominion sent a cease-and desist letter regarding defamatory claims Ward has made about the company, and ordered her to preserve all documents that relate to the matter. (Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell are both facing $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits by Dominion.)
But Trump and his Arizona allies are undaunted. “Arizona Republican State Senators are engendering such tremendous respect, even adoration, for the great job they are doing on the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” the former president said in a statement on May 25. “Our Country is watching as early public reports are indicating a disaster, far greater than anyone had thought possible, for Arizona voters.”
Arizona state senators have made it clear that the former president and his closest allies are influencing the audit behind the scenes. “I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,” Fann wrote in an email to a constituent on December 28. (The message was obtained through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight.) “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”
They're still making life hell for Brad Raffensperger and his family:
Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”
A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”
That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”
Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.
Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.
In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.
The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.
“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”
In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.
“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.
And not just the Raffenspergers:
The intimidation in Georgia has gone well beyond Raffensperger and his family. Election workers - from local volunteers to senior administrators - continue enduring regular harassing phone calls and emails, according to interviews with election workers and the Reuters review of texts, emails and audio files provided by Georgia officials.
One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” The specific text of the threat has not been previously reported. The email, a state election official said, was forwarded to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declined to comment for this story.
It's a longstanding norm that presidents immediately preceding the current one don't weigh in on what is happening in the current administration, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. The Very Stable Genius has not one subatomic particle of regard for this convention:
Consider that Elise Stefanik recently replaced Liz Cheney as House Republican conference chair. We traded integrity, principles and a solid conservative voting record for this:
There are still people I respect and to whose observations I give due consideration who insist that the GOP will remain the only other game in town along with the Democrats and that our nation's political system has weathered worse. I'm not seeing it. This is a 167-year-old party that has permitted its own ruination.
Conservatism is going to have to build something from the ground up.
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