‌Arizona Auditors Provide The Goods For Trumpian Election Deniers

?? Hello readers! 

The “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results has produced its final report: Joe Biden won. But more important for former President Trump and the GOP, the report spent most of its time on just-asking-questions “anomalies” in the election — shifting the goalposts yet again and providing the foundation for the next round of attacks on democracy.

The results underscored what we all knew about this audit, which was run by people with no experience in elections who’d shown a clear Trump bias: It was never about boosting confidence in elections.
 

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Alright, let’s dig in.

Arizona Auditors Give GOP What It Needs For Democracy Attacks

Yes, the Arizona “audit” report affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. But for the Republican elites clinging to Trump’s lie that his second term was stolen from him, that wasn’t the point.

Instead, they focused on the bulk of the report — the bit after tallying Biden’s victory that counted “potential ballots impacted” by various things. Nevermind that Maricopa County officials and elections experts quickly debunked this material.

Take, for example, the leader of the Republican Party. Ronna McDaniel wrote that the audit had “apparently revealed election integrity failures.” But the examples she cited failed to pass even the most basic smell test. One of McDaniel’s talking points, for example, was the supposed presence of “Voters who may have voted in multiple counties.”

That referenced a section of the report that implied it was suspect that people in different counties who participated in the election had the same name and birth year. I mean, come on! As Maricopa County officials observed in their attempts to counter the misinfo, there are seven active voters in the county alone who were born in 1980 and named Maria Garcia.

“There are clear process failures that need to be resolved so that voters have confidence in our elections. Failure to establish trust in our election systems will suppress voter turnout,” McDaniel said.

But wait: That was the point of the audit in the first place, right? “Trust in our election systems.” Apparently not. Now, these bogus examples of “process failures” are GOP orthodoxy, accompanied by more explicit threats of violence. If 2016 is any indication, this is all a precursor to more attempts to steal political power on specious “fraud” grounds.

For further reading: Extensive fact-checks from the Arizona Republic, Associated Press, ABC 15 and AZ Mirror.

Can Executive Action Fill In Voting Rights Gaps? 

As congressional voting rights packages stall, conservative judges continue to poke holes in the franchise, and Republican legislatures attack voter access, the executive branch has a role to play.

President Biden said so in March, when he gave executive agencies 200 days to submit plans to make voting easier. I’ve been speaking to voting rights activists and advocates for months about those plans, including people involved in calls with the administration. Bottom line: Agencies could do a lot, if they get creative. What if every college financial aid form came with an option to register to vote? What if every Social Security, public housing, and food stamp point-of-contact also offered to help people vote?

That’s all within the federal government’s authority. But will it flex its muscles? We don’t know yet: Though Biden’s 200-day deadline was Thursday, the administration hasn’t made the agencies’ plans public.

Still, people who’ve worked with the administration on voting rights sounded optimistic. Jacqueline De León, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said NARF was “encouraged by the attendance and the attentiveness” of the administration, though she and others said they, too, hadn’t yet seen concrete plans from the administration.

De León, who pointed to NARF’s thorough report on barriers to Native American voting, listed a couple new policies she’d like to see: Agencies with which would-be Native American voters often interact, including the Indian Health Service and the Department of Agriculture, could become “touch points” for registration. Also, the administration could work with the U.S. Postal Service to address “the dire lack of addressing across Indian country, and lack of residential mail delivery.”

The facts on the ground are plain, De León said: “White rural areas are getting more mail service than Native American areas.” The administration, she said, ought to address that and other disparities. 

Around The States

The former senator, NEVADA secretary of state and now gubernatorial candidate Dean Heller just won’t say who won the 2020 election! And he’s hardly alone: Reuters interviewed 9 candidates for secretary of state across five battleground states. Only two were willing to say Biden won in 2020.

MISSISSIPPI’s constitution disenfranchises people with some felony convictions. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments last week that the rules were explicitly racist.

Republicans in WISCONSIN want the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a redistricting case in a lower federal court, arguing that it’s a state matter.

The ACLU League of Women Voters of OHIO and other groups are suing the state’s redistricting commission, alleging “extreme partisan gerrymandering.”

TEXAS has a new proposed redistricting map. You can read details here, but the Associated Press sums it up succinctly: the proposed congressional districts would “shore up [Republicans’] slipping dominance and bolster their nearly two dozen U.S. House members.”

…and yet more redistricting news from COLORADO, MICHIGAN, NEBRASKA and ARKANSAS.

The Latest In Audit Mania

PENNSYLVANIA’s attorney general is suing to stop the enforcement of a subpoena for voters’ personal information and communication between election officials. State senate Democrats have also sued.

The America Project, a group founded by ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and a top funder of the ARIZONA audit and others, has apparently brought on a prominent QAnon influencer.

The man behind a lawsuit to examine Fulton County, GEORGIA’s ballots, Garland Favorito, spoke at Donald Trump’s rally in Perry, Georgia. We wrote about Favorito’s suit a while ago. It’s picked up a second wind in light of the Arizona audit news.

TEXAS’ secretary of state’s office has launched a “full forensic audit” — as always, these words have no set meaning — of the 2020 election results in four counties.

WaPo: “An elections supervisor embraced conspiracy theories. Officials say she has become an insider threat.”

The Atlantic: “Is It Time to Rethink Hyper-Minority Districts?”

WaPo: “Opinion: Our constitutional crisis is already here”