On tape, Sen. Fann said supervisors hid election fraud

Not long ago the investigative news website Documented.net released a three-hour tape of what it described as a “private, invite-only meeting organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)” earlier this month.

During the meeting, Republican Arizona Senate President Karen Fann — the person behind the wildly expensive, grossly incompetent and comically partisan Arizona election audit — makes a damning accusation against the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

Almost from the start, Fann and the board, controlled by Republicans, were at odds.

The failed, ridiculous, sham audit may be gone. But conspiracy theories abide.

Primarily because the supervisors refused to go along with the baseless claims of election fraud, or to play ball with Fann and the associates of President Donald Trump who were trying to overturn an election the supervisors knew to be conducted fairly and checked competently for accuracy.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, also a Republican, tried many times, in public and in print, to describe exactly how and why the election results in the county had been counted and verified, but was never able to give the conspiracy believers the answers they wanted to hear.

Fann, with the support of the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate, went ahead with the sham audit anyway, and continues to waste taxpayer money trying to prevent the public from seeing the exchanges that went on behind the scenes during that audit, a grotesquely ironic fact given the number of times during the three-hour meeting released by Documented.net that the word “transparency” is used.

The part of the tape I found most interesting happens at hour 2:08:22, when Fann essentially accuses the Board of Supervisors of not cooperating with the Senate because they were covering up problems they knew existed and had existed for years.

She says: “One of the things that I’d like to say, one of the things on that, is why the supervisors wouldn’t do it or why other people. This is where the politics, because they were first all gung ho to do it.

“And then when they (unclear) I’ll bet you a vodka martini right now that their attorneys said, don’t do this because, you know, we have problems with these elections. We knew it in ’18. We know it now. And if you do this, it’s going to (unclear) all of those problems again. I am sure that was what was said in that executive.”

She’s sure?

I contacted supervisors and asked what they thought of her comment.

Chairman Jack Sellers forwarded a statement saying, “Senator Fann clings to a fiction that something went

wrong in the 2020 General Election because it supports her outrageous expenditures on her poorly planned and executed ‘audit.’

“The Board of Supervisors worked with members of the Arizona Senate right up until the time they issued subpoenas after then-Chairman Clint Hickman testified with our Elections Director for six hours before their committee.

“She then insisted that body hold a vote of contempt as the Board sought clarification from Superior Court. Threats of arrest are not the path to a productive working relationship.”

That sounds logical enough.

Which gets to the root of the problem.

It would be difficult – impossible, really – to have a working relationship with someone when your truth doesn’t match their fiction.

Montini