Arizona GOP split on vote audit
For weeks, election professionals and Democrats have consistently called the Republican-backed review of November voting results in Arizona a fatally flawed exercise, marred by its partisan cast of characters and sometimes bizarre methodology.
Now, after a week in which leaders of the review suggested they had found evidence of illegal behavior, top Republicans in the state’s largest county have escalated their own attacks on the effort, with the county’s top election official calling former President Donald Trump “unhinged” for his online comments falsely accusing the county of deleting an elections database.
“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” the official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”
Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.
It is not the first time Republicans in county government have been at odds with the Republicans in the Legislature over the review of the vote. But Richer is among various Republicans in Maricopa County sounding like they have run out of patience.
The five elected supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, planned to meet Monday afternoon to issue a broadside against what Republican sponsors in the state Senate have billed as an election audit, which targets the 2.1 million votes cast in November in metropolitan Phoenix and outlying areas. The planned meeting follows a weekend barrage of posts on Twitter, with the hashtag #RealAuditorsDont, in which the supervisors assailed the integrity of the review.
Those posts followed a letter from the leader of the audit, state Sen. Karen Fann, implying that the county had removed “the main database for all election-related data” from election equipment that had been subpoenaed for review. Trump later published the letter on his website, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities.
The supervisors’ Twitter rebuke was scathing. Real auditors don’t “release false ‘conclusions’ without understanding what they are looking at,” one post said, ridiculing the allegation of a deleted database. Nor do real auditors “hire known conspiracy theorists,” a reference to the firm hired to manage the review, whose CEO has promoted theories that rigged voting machines caused Trump’s loss in Arizona.
Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, issued a statement calling the suggestion that files were deleted “outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate,” which ordered the audit. In an interview, he said the meeting on Monday would refute claims in the letter from Fann, the Senate president.
The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.