ARIZONA VOTE REVIEWERS SCOUR FOR ‘BAMBOO FIBRE’
Election official says recount ordered by Republican senators lacks safeguards.
Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan 6 riot, are doing the recounting.
All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out last week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter.
Ms Hobbs called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices”.
“Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalise the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit,’” she wrote to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and the liaison between Republicans in the state Senate and the company conducting it.
The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds. But it has become so troubled that the Department of Justice also expressed concerns this week in a letter saying that it might violate federal laws.
“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
The scene playing out in Arizona is perhaps the most off-the-rails episode in the Republican Party’s escalating effort to support former President Donald Trump’s lie that he won the election.
Four months after Congress certified the results of the presidential election, local officials around the country are continuing to provide oxygen for Mr Trump’s obsession that he beat Joe Biden last fall.
In Arizona, the review is proving to be every bit as problematic as sceptics had imagined. Last month, the Arizona Republic editorial board called for the state’s GOP Senate majority to stop “abusing its authority”.
Republican state senators ordered a review of the election in Maricopa County, whose 2.1 million ballots accounted for two-thirds of the entire vote statewide, in December, after some supporters of Mr Trump refused to accept his 10,457-vote loss in Arizona.
The senators later assigned oversight of the effort to a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had embraced conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines had been rigged to deliver the state to Mr Biden.
Since then, supporters of Mr Trump’s stolen-election story line have been given broad access to the site of the review, while election experts, the press and independent observers have struggled to gain access, sometimes resorting to going to court.
Anthony Kern, a former state representative who was photographed on the Capitol steps on the day of the insurrection — and who was on the Maricopa ballot both as a legislative candidate and as a presidential elector — was hired to help recount ballots.
Among other concerns, Ms Hobbs’ letter contended that stacks of ballots were not properly protected and that there was no apparent procedure for preventing the commingling of tallied and untallied ballots.
The security violations spotted by observers, the letter said, included ballots left unattended on tables and ballots counted using scrap paper instead of official tally sheets. Counters receive “on the fly” training. Ballots from separate stacks are mixed together. Software problems cause ballot images to get lost.
The letter also noted that some aspects of the process “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories than as a part of a professional audit”.
For instance, some ballots are receiving microscope and ultraviolet-light examinations, apparently to address unfounded claims that fraudulent ballots contained watermarks that were visible under UV light — or that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Southeast Asia using paper with bamboo fibres.
John Brakey, an official helping supervise the effort, said high-powered microscopes were being used to search for evidence of fake ballots, according to a video interview with the CBS News affiliate in Phoenix. “There’re accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in, to Arizona, and it was stuffed into the box,” he said. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” he added. “I’m just saying it’s part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”
Republicans in the Senate signed a contract agreeing to pay US$150,000 (4.6 million baht) for the vote review, a figure that many said then would not cover its cost. Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, the audit’s spokesman, said state Senate President Karen Fann would tell the Justice Department in her own letter there is no need for federal involvement.
The ballots at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix were guarded 24 hours a day and in no danger, he said.
Responding to the department’s concerns that Cyber Ninjas planned to interview voters, he denied it would amount to intimidation.
The recount’s official Twitter account, @ArizonaAudit, on Wednesday insisted Arizona had the right to review the results, “without interference from the Feds!”
There’re accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. RECOUNT OFFICIAL, JOHN BRAKEY