AG’s election report irresponsible

Arizona is highly fortunate to have the current composition of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and the current county recorder.

It’s hard to fathom how much further Arizona politics would have sunk without the modicum of ballast these officials – Bill Gates, Clint Hickman, Jack Sellers, Thomas Galvin, Steve Gallardo and Stephen Richer – have been able to provide from this side of reality.

It was also fortuitous that the Republican dominated board of supervisors took over the administration of the 2020 election from the then county recorder, Democrat Adrian Fontes. Not because there is any reason to believe that Fontes, now running for secretary of state, wouldn’t have administered a fair and accurate election.

The reason is this: Since it was the Republican supervisors running the election and a Republican county recorder now defending it, those clinging to the delusion that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump in Maricopa County have to assert that for some inexplicable reason it was Republicans, not a Democrat, who decided to do the thieving.

These sentiments of gratitude are beckoned by the county’s recent gale force response to Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s interim report on the 2020 election delivered to Senate President Karen Fann on April 6.

It’s hard to measure the full depth of irresponsibility in Brnovich’s interim report.

In the first place, the Attorney General’s Office is a legal agency, not a public policy think tank. It gives legal advice to state agencies, represents the state in court, and investigates and prosecutes violations of law where state statutes give it jurisdiction.

The office doesn’t do policy reports, interim or otherwise. And it isn’t supposed to comment on ongoing investigations, much less issue interim reports about them.

The timing and substance of the report make plain that this was a political document issued to further Brnovich’s campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, not anything remoting related to, or appropriate coming from, his AG office.

Brnovich has a serious political problem in the U.S. Senate campaign. Trump is still the most influential force among Republican primary voters. And Trump has made repeating the delusion that he actually won the 2020 presidential campaign a litmus test for being an acceptable GOP nominee.

Brnovich is among the growing ranks of formerly sensible people running in the Republican primaries this cycle. After

the 2020 election, he certified the results. And said that Trump lost because people ticket-split and didn’t vote for him while supporting other down-ballot Republicans, not because there was anything untoward about the administration of the election.

The interim report was an attempt to repair the damage this spasm of sanity has inflicted on his senatorial prospects. No interim report was necessary or appropriate in the discharge of his duties as attorney general.

The report seeks to cast some unjustified shade on the conduct of the election in Maricopa County through innuendo and artful phrasing.

The lead of the report is: “We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona.” Note that Brnovich doesn’t have the starch to flat out say that there are questions about the fairness and accuracy of the election results. He leaves that for Trump conspiracists to infer on their own.

As the county did with Fann’s fraudulent audit, it has provided a comprehensive and detailed response to Brnovich’s report findings, for those interested in the nitty-gritty. I’ll just cite a couple of illustrations of Brnovich’s irresponsible use of innuendo to cast the shadow of wrongdoing without actually charging anything specific or offering any proof.

Brnovich cites the fact that the number of early ballots rejected for missing or mismatched signatures has been going down as the number of early ballots has been increasing. His report says: “One possible explanation for these trends, and the AG acknowledges there could be others, is that Maricopa County became less diligent with signature review beginning in 2018.”

According to the county, it’s because more time and resources were devoted to curing such problems so legitimate voters weren’t disenfranchised. In other words, because the county became more diligent, not less.

With respect to the use of private grants by the secretary of state, Maricopa County and Pima County in the 2020 election, Brnovich’s interim report says: “Although our review is ongoing, our initial findings raise serious concerns regarding the legality of certain expenditures.”

And that’s it. Not a word about what sort of illegality or who might have committed it.

That’s a grossly irresponsible, broadly cast, hit-and-run smear in a public document. By the state’s chief law enforcement officer.

This interim report is the nadir of Brnovich’s unseemly conflation of his current job and his campaign for U.S. Senate.