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      Long After Trump’s Loss, a Push to Inspect Ballots Persists

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      Efforts to review 2020 ballots in Georgia and Arizona reflect the staying power of Donald Trump’s falsehoods, and Democrats fear that the findings could be twisted by Republicans.Georgia has already counted its 2020 presidential vote three times, with the same result: President Biden defeated Donald J. Trump narrowly yet decisively. But now portions of the vote will be inspected for a fourth time, after a judge ruled late last week that a group of voters must be allowed to view copies of all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in the state’s largest county.The move carries limited weight. The plaintiffs, led by a known conspiracy theorist, will have no access to the actual ballots, Georgia’s election results have already been certified after recounts and audits showed Mr. Biden as the winner with no evidence of fraud, and the review will have no bearing on the outcome.But the order from Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court was a victory for a watchdog group of plaintiffs that has said it is in search of instances of ballot fraud, parroting Mr. Trump’s election lies. Election officials in Fulton County, which contains most of Atlanta, worry that if such a review does occur there, it could cast further doubt on the state’s results and give Republican lawmakers ammunition to seek greater power over the administration of elections.“Where does it end? It’s like a never-ending circus, this big lie,” Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in an interview on Monday. “When they were accusing Fulton County and me in particular, I listened and I said — I said to the president, his representatives and I said to the secretary of state: ‘If you have evidence of any wrongdoing, bring it to me. If you do not, put up or shut up.’ And I repeat that again today.”The ruling in Georgia, a state that for months has weathered attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies as they falsely claimed the election had been stolen, coincided with a widely criticized Republican-led recount of over two million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., the largest county in another state that stunned Republicans by tipping to Mr. Biden last year after decades of G.O.P. dominance in presidential elections.That recount, which was approved by the Arizona state government and funded privately, resumed on Monday despite wide and bipartisan denunciations of the effort as a political sham and growing evidence that it is powered by “Stop the Steal” allies of Mr. Trump’s.The Arizona Republic reported on Saturday that volunteers being recruited to help recount the Maricopa ballots were being vetted by an organization set up by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the online retailer Overstock.com and a prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.On Monday, an independent nonprofit news outlet, azmirror.com, reported that the organization conducting the hand recount, Wake Technology Services, had been hired in December for an election audit in Pennsylvania by a nonprofit group run by Sidney Powell, a onetime member of Mr. Trump’s legal team and prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories about the election.Late Monday, Mr. Trump continued to rail against the election results, citing the Arizona recount and the Georgia court ruling. “More to follow,” he said in a statement issued by his office. The efforts to continue questioning the legitimacy of the election in two critical battleground states, nearly seven months after voting concluded, illustrate Mr. Trump’s hold over the Republican Party and the staying power of his false election claims. Even though Mr. Trump is not directly involved in the continued examinations of votes in Arizona and Georgia, his supporters’ widespread refusal to accept the reality of Mr. Biden’s victory has led fellow Republicans to find new and inventive ways to question and delegitimize the 2020 results.A recount of over two million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., the state’s largest, was paused this month and resumed on Monday.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesLeading the Georgia ballot review effort is Garland Favorito, a political gadfly in Georgia who has lingered on the conspiracy fringe of American politics for decades. In 2002, he published a book questioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He has also trafficked in unproven theories about the Kennedy assassination and, in 2014, he appeared in a video promoting the idea that the 14th Amendment was itself unconstitutional and argued that the federal government was therefore illegitimate and should be overthrown.In an interview, Mr. Favorito cited his “15 years” of experience as a self-styled elections investigator, saying he had been first motivated by Georgia’s purchase of new election machines that did not maintain paper-ballot records. He said that his concerns about the 2020 election stemmed in large part from affidavits filed by former election officials who claimed that they had handled ballots that appeared to be counterfeit because they were either not folded, appeared to be marked by a machine, or were printed on different stock. (There is no evidence of widespread use of counterfeit ballots.)Though Mr. Favorito refused to accept the findings of the recounts and audits already done in Georgia, he said he would be satisfied if, after inspecting the ballot copies, he and his team found no problems.“Once we find out the truth, if the results were correct, we can all go home and sleep at night knowing that it was right all along,” Mr. Favorito said.But he does not view leading Republicans in Georgia — some of whom, like former Senator Kelly Loeffler, have been vocally supportive of his efforts — as allies.“The Republican establishment hasn’t reached out, whatsoever,” he said, adding that he had not voted for Mr. Trump but for a third-party candidate. And the funding for the inspection, he said, would come from “patriots” making small-dollar donations. “We don’t have any big money.”The spread and repetition of false claims about the election follows familiar patterns for disinformation, which often occupies segmented corners of the internet and social media. Forces both algorithmic and organic will surface content — such as theories of election fraud based on grainy social media videos or anonymous allegations — for people who are inclined to agree with it.But what have further fueled Mr. Trump’s election claims, aside from his continued public pronouncements, are the many lawsuits filed by the former president and his allies after the 2020 election.“Even though all of the lawsuits got thrown out, the Trump campaign did file a whole bunch of baseless lawsuits, which adds a layer of legitimacy when you’re reading about a lawsuit that’s been filed versus some rumor, allegation or piece of content online,” said Lisa Kaplan, the founder of Alethea Group, a company that helps fight misinformation. “It ratchets it up a notch.”The Georgia effort could also yet extend beyond the Republican echo chamber in which the 2020 election is still being litigated. The state’s new election law ensures that the General Assembly, which is currently controlled by Republicans, has broad authority over counties through a restructured state election board. The board can, among other things, suspend county election officials.As Mr. Favorito did a victory lap on pro-Trump news outlets, he won praise from top Georgia Republicans. David J. Shafer, the pro-Trump chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, emailed fellow Republicans on Friday calling Judge Amero’s ruling “a very significant and encouraging development.”Ms. Loeffler also praised Mr. Favorito’s effort.“While there is a dire need to investigate a number of other well-documented issues, we must also inspect Fulton County’s absentee ballots to reassure Georgians that their voices are heard and their votes are counted,” she said.Even Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, signaled support for the inspection led by Mr. Favorito’s group.“Allowing this audit provides another layer of transparency and citizen engagement,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement on Friday.The support from Mr. Raffensperger, who is now running for re-election, surprised some political observers in Georgia. It was the secretary of state who stood up to the false claims of election fraud in Georgia espoused by Mr. Trump and who has highlighted the audits conducted by state government officials last year as definitive reaffirmations of the election results. His office also filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit, arguing that Mr. Favorito’s group should not be given physical ballots for security reasons, though Mr. Raffensperger took no stance on the case in his brief.“From day one, I have encouraged Georgians with concerns about the election in their counties to pursue those claims through legal avenues,” Mr. Raffensperger said in his statement.Michael Wines More

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      Voting Machines in Arizona Recount Should Be Replaced, Election Official Says

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      The Democratic secretary of state said she had “grave concerns regarding the security and integrity” of the machines that were examined to appease ardent backers of Donald J. Trump.Arizona’s top elections official on Thursday urged the state’s most populous county to replace hundreds of voting machines that have been examined as part of a Republican-backed review of the state’s November election.The request added fuel to charges by impartial election observers and voting rights advocates that the review, ordered in December by the Republicans who control the State Senate, had become a political sham.In a letter to officials of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, the elections official, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said it was unclear whether companies hired to conduct the review had sufficiently safeguarded the equipment from tampering during their review of votes.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, recommended that the county replace its 385 voting machines and nine vote tabulators because “the lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them.”The advisory, in a letter to the county’s board of supervisors, did not contend that the machines had been breached. But Ms. Hobbs wrote that she had “grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised.”She added that she had first consulted experts at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the national authority for election security issues.A spokeswoman for the county elections department said county officials “will not use any of the returned tabulation equipment unless the county, state and vendor are confident that there is no malicious hardware or software installed on the devices.”If the county decides to scrap the machines, it is unclear who would be responsible for paying to replace them. The State Senate agreed to indemnify the county against financial losses resulting from the audit.Republicans in the State Senate who ordered the review of the election said they wanted to reassure ardent backers of former President Donald J. Trump who refused to accept his narrow loss in Arizona. The review focused on Maricopa County, which produced two-thirds of the vote statewide.Mr. Trump has asserted that the audit would confirm his claims that his election loss was because of fraud, a charge that virtually every election expert rejects. With no formal electoral authority, the review could not change the results in Arizona.The audit was bombarded with charges of partisan bias after the State Senate hired a firm to manage the review whose top executive had spread baseless charges that Mr. Trump’s loss in the state was a result of fraud. The criticism has only mounted after nonpartisan election observers and journalists documented repeated lapses in the review’s process for recounting ballots. More

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      Arizona Senators Retract Claims of Deleted 2020 Presidential Election Files

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      A political firestorm erupted in Arizona this week after Republican-backed reviewers of the November election in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, suggested that someone had deleted a crucial data file from election equipment that had been subpoenaed as part of the inquiry.The county’s chief official, himself a Republican, called the charge outrageous. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has promoted the lie that the Arizona vote was rigged against him, boasted that the allegation was “devastating” evidence of irregularities.But on Tuesday, a contractor for the Republican-controlled State Senate, which is conducting the review, said the claim had become “a moot point.” The file had been found on a set of four computer drives in the election equipment, the contractor, Ben Cotton, said at a meeting on the review convened by Republican senators.Mr. Cotton’s effort to downplay the brouhaha fit the theme of the livestreamed meeting, in which the senators sought to cast the widely ridiculed review as a civics-lesson effort to improve election administration, not a bid to placate angry Trump supporters who refuse to accept his loss in the state.“I’ve said from the get-go that I’m relatively sure we are not going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply any intentional wrongdoing,” the president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, said at the session. Rather, she said, the review is expected to highlight that “we could do a little better job with the chain of custody” of voting material and other technical aspects of conducting an election.The review has nonetheless acquired a markedly partisan tilt, with senators employing a firm whose chief executive has spread conspiracy theories of an Arizona election stolen from Mr. Trump, and granting One America News and pro-Trump figures broad access to the process.Among the ardent set of believers that Mr. Trump actually won the November election, the notion that the Arizona review will demolish all evidence of President Biden’s victory has become an article of faith.Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, denounced the review on Monday as “a grift disguised as an audit.” Other Republicans in the county government have urged the State Senate to scrap the inquiry, saying it was an effort to undermine the November election and with it, Arizonans’ faith in democracy.In the meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Fann and another supporter of the review, State Senator Warren Petersen, largely ignored such criticisms, while expressing frustration that county officials had decided not to cooperate with their inquiry.The 70-minute session raised minor questions about the November election, such as a purported mismatch between some ballots that had been damaged at polling places and the duplicate ballots that were used to record those votes. But it made no broad claims of irregularities.Mr. Cotton, the founder of a data security firm in Ashburn, Va., called CyFIR, maintained that the data file at the center of the latest dispute over the audit had indeed been deleted from election equipment hard drives. But he later indicated that he had been unable to find the file because county election officials had not given him instructions to find it.Senator Petersen, seen by many as the prime supporter of the audit, called Mr. Cotton’s discovery of the supposedly deleted file “good news.” More

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      Arizona’s political odd couple reveals two distinct paths for Democrats

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      When Democrat Mark Kelly was sworn in to office late last year it marked the end of a nearly 70-year drought of Arizona being represented by two Democrats.But since then Kelly, a former astronaut, and his counterpart senator, Kyrsten Sinema, have plotted decidedly different paths in the Senate. Despite being from the same party and the same state and representing the same electorate, the pair of Arizona Democrats have become a sort of political odd couple.The twists and turns that each Arizona Democrat took to get into office – and the moves they are making to retain their seats – reveal two distinct paths Democrats can take to win and retain tough Senate seats. But they can also give differing answers as to how Democrats might keep power, or even extend it.Sinema, a longtime Arizona lawmaker and former Democratic member of the House of Representatives, has carved out a reputation as one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus in the chamber. Her name is almost synonymous with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and bucking the Democratic party on key sticking points.Sinema has split with her fellow Democrats on a minimum wage hike to $15 and support for an overhaul to the legislative filibuster. Among the press corps she is also notorious for avoiding virtually all interviews.Kelly himself offered levity when asked about their similarities and differences.“She can run a marathon at a 7.30 pace,” Kelly said. “I cannot do that.”Meanwhile, Kelly, 57, the husband of former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and a naval aviator turned astronaut, has plotted a more low-key course in the chamber. He talks to reporters. He hasn’t committed to overhauling the filibuster but he hasn’t come out in opposition either. He joined with other Democrats in supporting a minimum wage increase.Neither Democrat is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but the fact that they differ both stylistically and on key policies illustrates both the viability of Democrats in a state that for years has seemed out of reach to liberals and also the debate over what kind of Democrat can take root statewide.Both Sinema and Kelly are essential to Democrats retaining their slim majority in the chamber and, effectively, passing any legislation in the chamber. Kelly is considered more of a reliable party-line vote than Sinema but there are moments when they agree with each other and, in the process, buck the party at large.Kelly, in the hallway interview, said he couldn’t speak for how Sinema approaches legislating, but said in the five and a half months he’s been in Congress “our country is best served by trying to work across the aisle”.They have both bristled at Joe Biden’s approach to border security. Kelly called out Biden on the subject in response to the president’s address to Congress.“While I share President Biden’s urgency in fixing our broken immigration system, what I didn’t hear tonight was a plan to address the immediate crisis at the border, and I will continue holding this administration accountable to deliver the resources and staffing necessary for a humane, orderly process as we work to improve border security, support local economies, and fix our immigration system,” Kelly said in a statement shortly after Biden’s speech.They have also both participated in a bipartisan group of almost two dozen Republican and Democratic senators sometimes referred to as the G20. They have also recently been working on a bipartisan agreement on semiconductors, alongside some of the more conservative senators in both parties.They also both like to invoke the late Senator John McCain, a Republican, as an icon.But even to colleagues, it’s clear that Sinema and Kelly are different in key ways.“I think they are two unique and distinct characters,” said Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado. “And I use the word character freely.”Hickenlooper described Kelly as “one of the most grounded and thoughtful people”, adding: “He sees things that other people just don’t see.“He’s very intuitive,” Hickenlooper said. “They are so different and they are both – I think they’re both really smart and I think they’re both really good.”Asked if Kelly was slightly more liberal than Sinema, Hickenlooper said: “It’s hard to say. Their values are the same. Both are very progressive in terms of they think this country should be based on equality. We should have equal opportunity and schools should work for everybody.”But on policy positions, like the minimum wage, Hickenlooper said they have a “difference of opinion on tactics”.The backgrounds of Sinema and Kelly could only be more different if they were from opposing parties. For years Giffords was the political standard bearer of their family with Kelly in the background with a somewhat non-partisan air to him. His election to the Senate in 2020 was his first foray into electoral politics as a candidate.Sinema, by contrast has been in politics for years and her allegiances have shifted over time. She associated with the Arizona Green party before joining the Democratic party. She served in the state legislature and found success passing legislation by working with Republicans – even when Republicans held a supermajority. Jonathan Patton, who served with Sinema in the state legislature, recalls her finding success by keeping a single-minded focus on passing legislation.“If you’re in the legislature in Arizona, you’re not getting any bills passed,” recalled Paton.But during her time in the legislature, Sinema managed to do just that. She was able to get Republicans to work with her. “I don’t think she’s particularly ideological and I think it was a mistake on both sides for people to think she was. Now does that mean I agree with her on things? No it does not but my point is she was single-mindedly focused on getting things that she wanted, that was important to her for whatever reason,” Paton said.Sinema also taught at Arizona State University and served as a criminal defense lawyer. On the Hill, Sinema has at times been photographed in brightly colored wigs and a bright pink sweatshirt that reads “Dangerous Creature”.Kelly, a twin, spent his earlier years in life as a naval aviator and then a Nasa astronaut. He announced his retirement from spaceflight in 2011. In 2013, years after an assassination attempt on Giffords, the former congresswoman and Kelly founded the gun control advocacy group Americans for Responsible Solutions, which, in the process, made Kelly more visible to the political community. Until 2018 he was a registered Independent. In 2020 he won the special election for Senate, defeating the former senator Martha McSally.In recent years they have both had their eclectic moments – Sinema interned at a California winery and Kelly has been a brand ambassador to a Swiss luxury watchmaker. Sinema has also completed Iron Man triathlon competitions.Between the two senators, though, Sinema is the one with a bigger question mark over her head on key pieces of legislation like filibuster reform and the destiny of Biden’s roughly $2tn infrastructure package. She was one of a series of one-on-one sit downs Biden had with senators this week as the president pushes forward with attempts to find some kind of bipartisan infrastructure deal.Kelly meanwhile, is up for re-election next year and, alongside the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, is essential to Democrats’ hopes of retaining control of the Senate. Sinema has a little more time before she has to run again.“Mark is in cycle, he’s up for re-election in 2022,” noted Kirk Adams, a former Republican speaker of the Arizona house of representatives. “And a primary challenge from the progressive left would be very problematic for him – not that he wouldn’t win the primary but the effect that he would have in the general – being forced to move more left in what I think is truly a purple state. So that’s the first lens that I would apply to the differences between those two.” More

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      Arizona Republican calls Trump ‘deleted database’ statement ‘unhinged’

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      The Republican who leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.Richer became recorder in January, after defeating the Democratic incumbent.The Republican state senate president, Karen Fann, has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa county board of supervisors answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired.The Arizona senate took possession of 2.1m ballots and election equipment last month for what was supposed to be a three-week hand recount of the presidential race won by Joe Biden.We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a countryInstead, the auditors have moved as a snail’s pace and had to shut down on Thursday after counting about 500,000 ballots. They plan to resume counting in a week, after high-school graduation ceremonies planned for the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, which they rented for the recount.Trump’s statement said, in part, that “the entire database of Maricopa county in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.”Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.“Enough with the defamation. Enough with the unfounded allegations,” Richer tweeted on Thursday. “I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough.”The board, led by Republican chairman Jack Sellers, have been aggressively using Twitter to push back, firing off messages slamming the private company doing the audit. The board plans to hold a public hearing Monday.“I know you all have grown weary of lies and half-truths six months after 2020 general elections,” Sellers said on Friday in announcing Monday’s meeting.Fann sent Sellers a letter on Wednesday requesting county officials publicly answer questions at the senate on Tuesday, but she stopped short of her threat to issue subpoenas.Fann repeated the senate’s demand for access to administrative passwords for vote-counting machines and internet routers. County officials say they have turned over all the passwords they have and have refused to give up the routers, saying it would compromise sensitive data, including classified law enforcement information held by the sheriff’s office.Fann proposed allowing its contractor to view data from the routers at county facilities under supervision of the sheriff’s office.“The Senate has no interest in viewing or taking possession of any information that is unrelated to the administration of the 2020 general election,” she wrote.The county says the passwords the senate is seeking are maintained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the vote-counting machines and leases them to the county.The company said in a statement on Thursday that it cooperates with auditors certified by the US Election Assistance Commission, and did so for two prior audits of 2020 results in Maricopa county, but won’t work with Cyber Ninjas.Fann has hired that company, a Florida-based cybersecurity firm, to oversee an unprecedented, partisan review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county. They are conducting a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots and looking into baseless conspiracy theories suggesting there were problems with the election, which have grown popular with supporters of Trump. More

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      Cyber Ninjas, UV lights and far-right funding: inside the strange Arizona 2020 election ‘audit’

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterOne of the first things you see when you step outside Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the ageing arena in Phoenix, is the Crazy Times Carnival, a temporary spectacle set up in the parking lot. In the evenings, just as the sun is setting, lights from the ferris wheel, the jingle of the carousel and shrieks of joy fill the massive desert sky.Inside the coliseum – nicknamed the Madhouse on McDowell – there is another carnival of sorts happening. The arena floor is where the Arizona senate, controlled by Republicans, is performing its own audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa county, home of Phoenix and most of the state’s registered voters. The effort, which comes after multiple audits affirming the results of the November election in the county in favor or Joe Biden, includes an examination of voting equipment, an authentication of ballot paper, and a hand recount of the nearly 2.1m ballots cast there. Republicans in the state legislature are simultaneously considering measures that would make it harder to vote in Arizona, which Biden carried by about 10,000 votes in November.The review – unprecedented in American politics – may also be one of the clearest manifestations to date of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud and the conspiracy theories that spread after the election (the former president and allies have loudly cheered on the Arizona effort). Far-right conspiracy theorists appear to be connected to the effort and the firm hired to lead the charge, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, has little experience in elections. The firm’s CEO has voiced support for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.Election experts are watching the unfolding effort with deep alarm, pointing out that officials are not using a reliable methodology – they hesitate to even label it an audit – and will produce a results that will give more fodder for conspiracy theorists. More troublingly, they worry the Arizona audit could be a model for Republicans to try elsewhere.“There’s not gonna be a valid result,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is the state’s top election official. “They’re writing the playbook here to do this around the country.” Indeed, Trump allies are already pushing for a similar effort in a small town in New Hampshire. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman in Georgia, has called for a similar audit in her state.Trump and allies have cheered on the effort. Outside the arena, Kelly Johnson, a 61-year-old from California, was among a small group of five people sitting in a tent who supported the effort. Johnson, who said he was at the Capitol on 6 January, when rioters stormed the building, claimed Trump didn’t fully have a chance to make his case in court after the election. Judges across the country, including several appointed by Trump, rejected several lawsuits to try and overturn the election results.A lot of people, he said, “are concerned … about whether or not the results are accurate because there has been no review, thorough review, accounting for results that anybody can have any confidence in”, he said.Last week, Hobbs, who has received death threats over her opposition, sent a letter to audit officials detailing problems with how it was being conducted. Many of the audit’s publicly-released procedures are vague, she wrote, laptops left unattended, and there weren’t guaranteed procedures in place to protect the chain of custody of ballots. The justice department sent its own letter to the Arizona senate expressing similar concerns as well as questioning a plan to knock on voters’ doors and to confirm their 2020 vote, which could lead to voter intimidation.Karen Fann, the Arizona senate president, replied on Friday, saying that auditors would “indefinitely defer” knocking on doors and that there were procedures in place to safeguard the ballots. She noted that the senate had hired Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state, to be “integrally involved in overseeing every facet of the audit”.But during several interviews with reporters last week, Bennett – a mild mannered and cheery 61-year-old – said he was unable to provide basic information about how the audit was running. He declined to say how many ballots the auditors were counting each day, instead pegging the overall estimate at about 200,000 counted ballots (as of Monday it had gone up to 275,000). After Anthony Kern, a Trump elector and former state lawmaker, appeared at a ballot counting table, Bennett said he was unsure how workers were being chosen (the Arizona Republic reported that far-right groups were involved in recruiting counters for the audit).And while audits usually ensure that representatives from both parties are present to inspect ballots, it’s unclear to what extent that’s happening, if at all, in Phoenix. Bennett said that 70% of observers – who do not count ballots – were Republicans and the remaining 30% were independents, libertarians and Democrats.While there were 46 tables set up to hold ballot counters in the arena last week, less than half of them were in use each day. Bennett told reporters repeatedly that the tables would soon be filled with additional workers who were undergoing background checks, but those workers have yet to materialize.Officials have also been opaque about what exactly they’re looking for in their analysis for ballot authenticity. In late April, auditors were seen scanning ballots with UV lights, arousing suspicion because of a QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump watermarked legitimate ballots after the election. Last week John Brakey, an activist assisting with the audit, said officials were looking for bamboo fibers in a nod to a baseless conspiracy theory that ballots were smuggled in from China. “I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?” Bennett quickly distanced himself from Brakey’s comments, saying: “I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying, ‘We’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic.’”Jeff Ellington, the president and CEO of Runbeck Election Services, which prints ballots for Maricopa county, said he couldn’t figure out what exactly auditors were looking for by examining the paper of the ballots.“What they’re doing is so cryptic,” he said. “It’s hard to know exactly what their game plan is on that.”Bennett and audit leaders have also declined repeatedly to comment on funding for the audit. The Arizona senate allocated just $150,000 to pay for the audit, far below the estimated cost. Trump-aligned figures, including attorney L Lin Wood and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, have reportedly already donated to the effort. Two anchors with the One America News network, a far-right outlet, have also been fundraising. Last Tuesday, Christina Bobb, a reporter for the network, recorded a segment from the press box that both reported on the audit and promoted the fundraising effort.Last week, the counting itself looked relatively simple, even boring. Workers were divided up into four teams. Tables with lazy susans in the middle were scattered across the arena floor. Three workers sat at each table with a tally sheet and counted votes in the presidential and US senate race as the ballots spun around the table. Once they finished counting a batch, the ballots go to a second table, where workers photographed each side, and then scanned the ballots under microscopic cameras. Observers dressed in bright orange shirts roamed the floor and watched for wrongdoing. A banner for Phoenix’s women’s basketball team hangs high above the floor that says: “The Madhouse is our house.”Despite the benign appearance, expert observers say there are glaring problems with the audit. Jennifer Morrell, a former election official designated a floor observer by the secretary of state’s office, noted that the ballots were spinning quickly around the table, giving counters little time to see the marks on the paper. In instances where there were discrepancies in the count, Morrell said she saw each table handle recounts slightly differently. She was also alarmed to see that once the ballots were tallied, there was no check to ensure that workers were entering aggregate totals into software.There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct“There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct,” she said. “One person, single point of failure, as a former election official, someone who does audits, it’s a huge red flag for me,” she said.The audit has been livestreamed online since it began in late April, but in-person public access is limited to just a handful of pool reporters who rotate in five-hour shifts and watch the effort from the arena’s press box, a dust-covered section about 20 rows up in the stands. It was close enough to see the counting on the floor, but not enough to see any details (some reporters brought binoculars to try and get a better view). Armed members of Arizona Rangers, a volunteer auxiliary law enforcement group, were stationed in the box and members accompanied reporters to the bathroom.It’s not clear what exactly the endgame of the audit is. Hobbs said she expected the officials to issue a report based on procedures that would be difficult to replicate because the process was so opaque. And Bennett acknowledged last week there was likely to be some discrepancy between the auditors’ total and the official total.“I don’t think anyone’s expecting that you’re going to count 2.1m somethings twice, using different methods, and you’re going to come up with exactly the same number,” he said. “The only unacceptable error rate is when it’s enough to make a difference in a particular race. And I’m not expecting there to be a difference of that magnitude.”Even though the audit won’t change the outcome of the 2020 race, it could still do damage by falsely making it appear that there was something amiss with election machinery.“They are taking advantage of the lack of information that the public has regarding the complexities of our system. And they’re creating a false narrative, and they’re setting themselves up to sell that false narrative,” said Fontes, who lost his re-election bid in November.That dynamic is already on display. Arizona Republicans last week accused Maricopa county of wrongly not turning over internet routers as well as administrative passwords for voting tabulators. County officials have resisted, saying that only Dominion, the election equipment vendor, has the passwords, which aren’t necessary to conduct an audit. Providing the routers, they said, would also jeopardize county security and personal information. The Maricopa county sheriff ,Paul Penzone, a Democrat, called the request for the routers “mind-numbingly reckless”. Conservative outlets have misleadlingly pointed to that denial as evidence of potential unusual activity.This may be the ultimate point of the audit – not to bring any finality to the 2020 election, but simply to provide more rabbit holes to go down to question it.Fontes, the former Maricopa county election official, doubted that the audit would change the mind of anyone who doubted the results of the election.“It can’t convince the conspiracy theorists. The only thing that will convince the conspiracy theorists of anything is a Trump victory,” he said. “That’s the only thing that they will accept. And if that’s the case, then this doesn’t matter. They don’t care about the truth.” More

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      in US Politics

      Why the Arizona ‘recount’ of 2.1m votes is dangerous

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterBy now, you’ve probably heard about the unprecedented effort to recount 2.1m votes in Arizona and all of the wacky conspiracy theories – including searching for bamboo fibers in ballots – that the effort seems to be amplifying.I watched this effort in person for three days last week. Election administration experts – who usually go out of their way to be non-partisan – have raised alarms about the process. But as I watched it unfold in Phoenix from the press box about 20 rows up from the arena floor, I couldn’t shake the idea of how benign, even normal, the whole thing might look to a casual observer. Three different counters at each table were tallying ballots, which were then photographed and scanned – what exactly was happening that made this so dangerous?I posed this question to Jennifer Morrell, who was on the floor observing the counting as a representative of the Arizona secretary of state’s office. Morrell, a former elections official from Colorado, specializes in the machinery of elections – the technology, the counting procedures and all the other wonky things that make elections run smoothly. She is not a flame-throwing partisan. But as we talked on the phone last week, I could tell from her voice that what she was seeing in the Arizona recount really bothered her.One of the biggest red flags for her, she told me, came not during the counting, but afterwards, when workers entered the aggregated total tallies from counts into computers. Morrell was deeply worried that there was only a single person responsible for entering the data and no one to check that they weren’t inadvertently entering a wrong number or accidentally switching the candidates.“There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct. There’s no reading out. These are things that you would typically see in an election office whether they were doing an audit, recount, where you want some sort of quality control mechanism in place,” she said.Morrell also expressed concern with the procedures in place to keep a baseline count of the ballots being handled across the audit. If a box of ballots says it has a certain amount of ballots in it, workers should count when they open the box to make sure that there’s actually that amount of ballots in there. And when ballots leave each station, they should also ensure that all of the ballots are accounted for. Not every station in the audit is doing that.At the counting table, the ballots spin around on a lazy susan to three different counters who are counting the presidential and US Senate races. As long as two of the three counters agree in their tallies and the third counter is within three votes, the tally is accepted. But when there is disagreement, the tables have to go back and redo their count. Morrell said she noticed that different tables had slightly different procedures for doing so. Some tables would go back and recount the whole batch of ballots, while others might just recount a smaller proportion of them.“It’s the consistency that’s an issue for me,” she said. “There’s no audit or even recount process that looks like this.”Aside from ballot counting, auditors are also performing a so-called forensic analysis of the ballot paper. The whole thing looks very hi-tech and official – ballots are photographed and then placed under a sophisticated-looking machine with microscopic cameras that is supposed to give a detailed analysis of the ballots.Jovan Pulitzer, a failed inventor and conspiracy theorist, is reportedly helping auditors with this portion of their review. He purports to have developed technology that can detect fraudulent ballots by looking for folds in the paper, as well as analyzing whether the ballots were marked by a human or a machine, the latter of which is, in his view, suspicious.Adrian Fontes, the former Maricopa county recorder who oversaw the 2020 election, said this process wouldn’t tell the auditors anything. If ballots arrive at an election office damaged, he said, they are duplicated electronically and then printed out with machine-made marks. This isn’t a sign of fraud – it’s a sign the process is working.Tammy Patrick, a former Maricopa county election official who now works with election administrators across the country as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, also noted that folds in a ballot don’t tell you anything about a ballot’s authenticity.PT 1For those who need to hear it again:📬Not all VBM/EV ballots that were tallied in Maricopa will be folded.✍Some may have been remade/duplicated onto ballot stock that was never mailed:🌍Military & overseas votes😎 Braille/lg print ballots☕ Damaged/torn ballots— Tammy Patrick (@aztammyp) May 12, 2021
      Pt 2And some in person ballots WILL be folded–such as provisionals.Again: 🤦‍♀️FOLDS 🤦‍♀️MEAN 🤦‍♀️ABSOLUTELY 🤦‍♀️NOTHINGIt is disingenuous & deceptive to imply otherwise.— Tammy Patrick (@aztammyp) May 12, 2021
      “They are taking advantage of the lack of information that the public has regarding the complexities of our system. And they’re creating a false narrative, and they’re setting themselves up to sell that false narrative.” Fontes told me. “I’m afraid they’re going to come out and say ‘oh we found pre-printed ballots’ and there aren’t going to be enough people who stand up and say ‘well no shit.’”Also worth watching …
      Arizona Republicans approved a new law on Tuesday that essentially does away with a longstanding state policy of allowing residents to choose to permanently receive a mail-in ballot. Under the new measure, which will take effect in 2026, a voter can be removed from the list if they don’t vote by mail in two consecutive primary and general elections. State officials estimated in February that 200,000 voters could be affected.
      Senate Democrats advanced S1, the sweeping voting rights proposal that would amount to the most significant expansion of voting rights in a generation. But the bill still faces a huge hurdle on the Senate floor because Democrats don’t have enough votes to overcome the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. The West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a key Democratic holdout on the issue, told ABC News on Wednesday he favors passing separate legislation that would fully restore a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act over the sweeping bill. It’s unclear how Democrats will proceed on both measures. More