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      Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be Underestimated

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      Like most Democrats, I initially underestimated Donald Trump. In 2015, I founded a super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton. Through all the ups and downs of the campaign, I didn’t once imagine that Americans would vote Mr. Trump in.He was an obvious pig (see the “Access Hollywood” tapes), a fraud (multiple failed businesses and bankruptcies) and a cheat (stiffing mom-and-pop vendors). Not to mention the blatant racism and misogyny. About the outcome, I was spectacularly wrong.Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee’s “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.David Brock (@davidbrockdc) is the founder of Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Arizona Vote Review ‘Made Up the Numbers,’ Election Experts Say

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      An analysis found that a hand recount of votes by Republican investigators missed thousands of ballots, and possibly many more.The circuslike review of the 2020 vote commissioned by Arizona Republicans took another wild turn on Friday when veteran election experts charged that the very foundation of its findings — the results of a hand count of 2.1 million ballots — was based on numbers so unreliable that they appear to be guesswork rather than tabulations.The organizers of the review “made up the numbers,” the headline of the experts’ report reads.The experts, a data analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and two retired executives of an election consulting firm in Boston, said in their report that workers for the investigators failed to count thousands of ballots in a pallet of 40 ballot-filled boxes delivered to them in the spring.The final report by the Republican investigators concluded that President Biden actually won 99 more votes than were reported, and that former President Donald J. Trump tallied 261 fewer votes.But given the large undercount found in just a sliver of the 2.1 million ballots, it would effectively be impossible for the Republican investigators to arrive at such precise numbers, the experts said.Rod Thomson, a spokesman for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired to conduct the inquiry in Arizona, rejected the experts’ claim. “We stand by our methodology and complete final report,” he said.Investigators went through more than 1,600 ballot-filled boxes this summer to conduct their hand recount of the election in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. Both they and the Republican-controlled State Senate, which ordered the election inquiry, have refused to disclose the details of that hand count.But a worksheet containing the results of the hand count of 40 of those boxes was included in a final report on the election inquiry released a week ago by Cyber Ninjas.The three election experts said the hand count could have missed thousands or even hundreds of thousands of ballots if all 1,600 boxes of ballots were similarly undercounted. Their findings were earlier reported in The Arizona Republic.For months, the Cyber Ninjas effort had been the lodestar of the conservative movement, the foundational investigation that would uncover a litany of abuses and verify countless conspiracies, proving a stolen election. But the review was criticized from the start for unprofessional and unorthodox methods and partisan influence.Now, the experts’ findings on the vote review compound withering analyses debunking a wide range of questions raised in the review about the counting of votes and conduct of the election. Nonetheless, the review has been embraced by Mr. Trump and his followers even as its findings have been overwhelmingly refuted.Noting that the leaders of the Arizona review had “zero experience in election audits,” the experts concluded, “We believe the Ninjas’ announcement that they had confirmed, to a high degree of accuracy, the election results” of one of the largest U.S. counties “is laughable.”Laughable or not, none of it changed the fact that Mr. Biden won the state by about 10,500 votes and Maricopa County by roughly 45,000 in several official tallies of the vote.Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, said the report’s findings vindicated criticisms about the Cyber Ninjas process.“It was clear from the start that the Cyber Ninjas were just making it up as they went,” Ms. Hobbs said in a statement. “I’ve been saying all along that no one should trust any ‘results’ they produce, so it’s no surprise their findings are being called into question. What can be trusted are actual election officials and experts, along with the official canvass of results.”The results of the review were presented to the Arizona State Senate last week.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe inquiry into the election has been repeatedly condemned as a sham by election experts and denounced by the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the 2020 vote.Critics note that the chief executive of Cyber Ninjas had spread false allegations that Arizona voting machines were rigged to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. The summer-long investigation was financed almost entirely by nearly $7 million in donations from Trump supporters.The experts based their conclusion on a worksheet containing a slice of the hand-count results that the Republican investigators published in the report on their inquiry. The worksheet shows that investigators counted 32,674 ballots in 40 of the 1,634 boxes of ballots they were reviewing.But official records show — and the investigators’ own machine count of the 2.1 million ballots effectively confirmed — that those 40 boxes actually contained 48,371 ballots, or 15,692 more than were counted.The worksheet indicated that nine of the boxes had not been counted at all. But even if those boxes were excluded from the tally, the count of the remaining boxes fell 4,852 ballots short of the correct total, the experts said.The charge of a ballot undercount comes atop the debunking by experts and Maricopa officials of virtually all of 22 implications of voting irregularities, involving more than 50,000 voters, in the Cyber Ninjas report.Among them: A claim that 23,434 mail-in ballots may have come from addresses that voters no longer occupied was based on research using a commercial address database that itself did not include 86,391 of the county’s registered voters and, like most lists, relied on sources that are often inaccurate. It also ignored the fact that voters may legally cast ballots and then move. And moving is common: More than 280,000 Maricopa County households moved in 2019 alone.Another claim that thousands of voters returned more ballots than they received misconstrued a data file that makes a new entry every time a damaged or incomplete ballot is corrected.Yet another claim that precincts counted 836 more votes than were recorded ignored the fact that the records of some 3,600 voters, such as abused spouses and police officers, are not made public for security reasons. And an insinuation that 5,295 Maricopa County voters may have double-voted because residents of other counties had the same names and birth years was spot-checked by county officials and found baseless; the outsiders were in fact other people.With similar reviews now set for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas, it is increasingly clear that Arizona’s partisan review succeeded while it failed — by amplifying baseless talking points while failing in any factual way to back up Mr. Trump’s claims of a rigged election.The Arizona-style reviews in other states seem likely to follow the same script with the blessing of the Republican political leaders who are promoting them, said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, elections expert and scholar of democracy.“For those who are pushing the fraud narrative, the actual truth is beside the point,” he said. “The idea that the election was stolen is becoming a tribe-defining belief. It’s not about proving something at this point. It’s about showing fealty to a particular description of reality.”Indeed, in the wake of the initial Cyber Ninjas report, Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate only furthered their resolve to press ahead with a review of the election, one that includes a request for drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of all seven million Pennsylvania voters.“The historic audit in Maricopa County is complete and significant findings have been brought to light,” State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and leading proponent of the election review, said in a statement last week. “If these types of issues were uncovered in Maricopa County, imagine what could be brought to light from a full forensic audit in other counties around the U.S. who processed mass amounts of mail-in ballots.”On Friday, Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, signed multiple subpoenas issued to the head of the elections commission in Milwaukee, the biggest city in the state and home to the largest concentration of Democratic voters, with a substantive request for documents, including communication between the city and state elections boards.Mr. Vos, in an interview this week, reiterated his commitment to investigating the 2020 election, with a presumption that there were mistakes in the administration.“I think we kind of have to accept that certain things were done wrongly — figure out how to correct them, or else we’re never going to have public confidence,” Mr. Vos said.Reid J. Epstein More

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      The Arizona recount didn’t find more Trump votes. But Republicans got what they wanted | David Litt

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      OpinionUS politicsArizona’s recount didn’t find more Trump votes. But Republicans got what they wantedDavid LittThe sham audit actually increased Biden’s vote. But Arizona Republicans’ goal was never to overturn the last election – it was to lay the groundwork for overturning the next one Thu 30 Sep 2021 09.32 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 Sep 2021 10.39 EDT“Humiliation.” “Embarrassment.” “Trump a Bigger Loser than First Thought.”Last week, the Arizona Republicans’ sham election “audit” ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Launched in April to help Donald Trump legitimize his false claims of voter fraud, the review of Phoenix-area ballots was – even by its own low standards – an incompetent mess. For months, would-be sleuths chased bizarre conspiracy theories, wasted taxpayer dollars and compromised private voter information. When the results were finally announced last week, they revealed that Joe Biden had not only won Arizona, but had in fact won it by an even larger margin than previously reported.Not exactly what big lie believers were hoping for.But the majority of Americans, those who reject the big lie, shouldn’t celebrate just yet. While the sham audit failed to substantiate Trump’s false fraud claims, Arizona Republicans’ goal was never really to overturn the last election – it was to lay the groundwork for overturning the next one. And it still may do just that.To understand why the Arizona “audit” remains so dangerous to American democracy despite its lackluster results, it’s important to recognize that after leaving office, Trump and his fellow big liars have been far less interested in looking for evidence of non-existent fraud than in sowing doubt about our general system of elections. By that standard, the audit was far from a failure. Nearly a year after their state’s vote was first counted, Arizona Republicans were able to use the pretext of protecting “election integrity” to avoid fully conceding defeat. In doing so, they undermined a central element of the peaceful transfer of power – the idea that the losers of elections acknowledge the winners’ legitimacy.At the same time, the Arizona Republican party’s fake election audit could undermine the credibility of real ones. Audits are an important tool for election officials – they help us understand the electorate and identify administrative issues, such as long lines, that can reduce access to the ballot. Most states conduct audits, and they’re one reason that, contrary to Trump and his allies’ wild claims, election fraud is extremely rare and difficult to get away with.Impartially conducted recounts play a similarly important role in extremely close elections – and historically, the votes initially left uncounted are disproportionately cast by younger or more sporadic voters, who tend to support Democrats. If a close race results in a recount in 2022, or if a Trump-affiliated election official commits fraud on Republicans’ behalf, the Republican party will probably point to Democrats’ condemnation of the Arizona “audit” to attempt to delegitimize any genuine effort to protect the integrity of elections.Finally, the Arizona audit has revealed that yet another norm of American democracy is supported by nothing more than both parties’ good faith. A year ago, despite then President Trump’s barrage of false fraud claims, it would have been hard to imagine that one of our two political parties could spend millions of taxpayer dollars attacking its own election and face no consequences whatsoever. Yet that’s where we are today.It’s no surprise, then, that Republican elected officials are pushing the envelope even further. Some Arizona Republicans are demanding even more taxpayer-funded audits, and Republican politicians outside the state are demanding equally spurious “audits” of their own. In Colorado, a county election clerk is suspected of going one step further, helping accomplices break into her own office to steal voter data for a vigilante ballot review. Across the country, volunteer election workers are facing unprecedented harassment and even death threats, just for doing their jobs.Morally speaking, it’s reprehensible that Trump and his Republican allies have doubled down on the big lie. As a practical matter, however, why would they stop now? If their strategy works, they might be able to hold on to power without having to worry about voters or elections. And if their strategy fails, there so far appears to be no cost to them.There would, however, be an enormous cost to America. There is now a new norm in US politics: if Republicans lose a close election, they will not recognize the winner until they are, by whatever arbitrary metrics they come up with, satisfied with the integrity of the result. We are careening toward a system of government in which elections are never settled and politicians are allowed to keep competing for power long after the final results are in. In such a system of government, politicians like Donald Trump would be free to seek power through means other than elections – and after 6 January, it’s not hard to imagine what form those means might be.But it’s not too late to turn Arizona’s sham audit into the spectacular failure that Donald Trump and his fellow big liars deserve. Democrats should not hesitate to tie the sham audit’s supporters directly to the violence of 6 January and to make it clear how much their reckless crusade cost taxpayers. Right now, Republican politicians undermine confidence in our elections because they think it will help them maintain power; if the incentives change, their behavior will, too.The Biden administration can also do its part to ensure that undermining elections comes with consequences. The Department of Justice should never be used as a political weapon – but if politicians commit federal crimes in an effort to overturn a fair and free election, they should be fully prosecuted. To do anything less would be to suggest that elected officials are above the law. Lawmakers can discourage sham audits by making it a crime to knowingly spread false election information, while local election officials can do more to publish their audit and recount rules in advance, drawing a clear distinction between genuine election-protection measures and the kind of dangerous political stunts embraced by Trump and his Republican allies.Ultimately, however, the single most important thing we can do in the face of an unprecedented threat to democracy is resist the temptation to ignore it. Republican politicians failed to overturn an election this time around, but they certainly don’t seem embarrassed. On the contrary, democracy’s opponents are acting more brazen than ever, and appear more confident that next time they’ll succeed. It’s up to us to take them seriously – and in doing so, to prove them wrong.
      David Litt is an American political speechwriter and New York Times bestselling author of Thanks Obama, and Democracy In One Book Or Less. He edits How Democracy Lives, a newsletter on democracy reform
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      Ignoring Arizona Humiliation, ‘Stop the Steal’ Races Forward

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      As a Republican review of 2020 votes in Arizona sputtered to a close, Donald Trump and his allies signaled that their attack on the election, and their drive to reshape future elections, were far from over.After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there.But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election.Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials.Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication — offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.“The leaked report conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over,” Mr. Trump said in a statement early Friday evening, one of seven he had issued about Arizona since late Thursday. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated!”For Mr. Trump, Republican candidates vying to appeal to voters in primary races, and conservative activists agitating for election reviews in their own states, the 91-page document served as something of a choose-your-own-adventure guide. These leaders encouraged their supporters to avert their eyes from the conclusion that Mr. Biden had indeed won legitimately, and to instead focus on fodder for a new set of conspiracy theories.“Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County — the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona who supported the effort in Maricopa, wrote on Twitter. “There are 35k votes in question from multiple sources & I want answers.”Even Republicans who do not subscribe to false claims of election fraud are using investigations to justify more restrictive voting laws. In Michigan, State Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican who leads his chamber’s elections committee and wrote an unsparing report in July debunking an array of Trump-inspired fraud claims, said Friday that the discovery of potential avenues for election fraud — not evidence of fraud itself — was reason enough to pass new voting restrictions.“Just like we found in Michigan, it’s good that we found that these vulnerabilities weren’t exploited to any important extent in this election,” Mr. McBroom said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean that somebody might not use them in the future.”Cherry-picking from the report on Friday, the former president and his allies cited a series of eye-popping statistics that, on first glance, appeared to bolster their case, trusting that their supporters either would not digest the document in full or would not trust the mainstream news outlets that laid out its complete contents.Peter Navarro, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, falsely claimed on Twitter that the report had shown that 50,000 potentially illegal votes were cast in Maricopa County. That number was in fact the tally of ballots that the report — through questionable methodology — described as problematic in some way.Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, pointed on Twitter to “23,000+ Phantom Voters.” This was apparently a reference to 23,344 mail-in ballots that Cyber Ninjas, the company assigned by Arizona Republicans to carry out the review, had claimed came from voters listed under prior addresses. (Such claims were quickly refuted by the Maricopa County elections board, which said that “this is legal under federal election law.”)People in Phoenix, including supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, watched a live stream on Friday as the results of the election review were presented to the Arizona State Senate.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesProponents of the Arizona review seized on vague suggestions by the report’s authors that “canvassing,” or the common political campaign practice of knocking on doors, was needed. Without defining what sort of canvass they had in mind, many Republicans in Arizona and beyond made the word a new rallying cry in the hunt for election fraud.“Canvass Maricopa,” Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona, wrote on Twitter.The Arizona review, and similar partisan election investigations around the country, are one spear in a multipronged effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to dispute the outcome of the 2020 race and to overhaul future American elections.That push has alarmed Democrats, good-government groups and historians, who point to the ways that Mr. Trump undermined democratic norms while in office, including his fight to subvert last year’s election, an effort that culminated in the Capitol riot.New evidence for their arguments emerged this week in the form of a memo unearthed in a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post. According to the memo, drafted by John Eastman, a Republican lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign, by refusing to accept the results, Mr. Trump could help prompt a state legislature to send an alternative slate of electors to Congress.The memo concluded that, with multiple slates to consider, former Vice President Mike Pence and allies in Congress could refuse to certify the states in question, which would nullify the election results and lead instead to a vote in the House of Representatives on the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote.In 2020, Republicans held the advantage in state delegations, with 26, meaning that Mr. Trump would have successfully overturned the election in this scenario.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Arizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 election

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      ArizonaArizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 electionHand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported Sam Levine and Oliver MilmanFri 24 Sep 2021 09.40 EDTLast modified on Fri 24 Sep 2021 09.41 EDTA partisan, Republican-instigated so-called “audit” of the 2020 election result in Arizona has confirmed that Joe Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county, according to a draft report of the review.A month-long hand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported in the November election. Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on his way to getting more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history during the election.Cyber Ninjas, UV lights and far-right funding: inside the strange Arizona 2020 election ‘audit’Read moreTrump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the election and was a victim of fraud, despite no evidence of this, and state Republicans in Arizona seized upon these lies to demand an audit of vote in Maricopa county. Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company with no experience of election audits, owned by a man who spread election conspiracy theories, wrote the report, entitled Maricopa County Forensic Audit.The investigation is the most extensive partisan effort to date to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election and has been widely celebrated by Trump and allies who falsely believe the election is stolen.Even though the investigation was sanctioned by the GOP-controlled Arizona senate, it was funded by $5.7m in outside money, much of which came from conspiracy theorists, including $3.2m from Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com and an additional $1m from a non-profit founded by Michael Flynn.Election experts have widely panned the review, which they say was rooted in shoddy practice around a pre-determined effort to show there was fraud. Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, told reporters on Thursday that Trump allies were “desperate for a win” In Maricopa county, he said, they had gotten unprecedented access to look under the hood of an election. If they were not able to prove fraud there, they were unlikely to prove it anywhere else.Regardless of what the report says, Republican efforts to conduct similar reviews are underway. Republicans in both the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures are moving forward with similar investigations into the 2020 race. And on Thursday, Trump called for a review of the 2020 race in Texas, a state he carried in 2020 by nearly six points. Experts worry that the reviews suggest a new normal, where the losers of elections simply refuse to accept the results.The draft report emerged on Thursday and has been confirmed as authentic by a spokesman for the audit effort, who said it is “close” to the final report. Maricopa County’s board of supervisors, led by Republicans, said that the report confirmed that the county had run an accurate election.“This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters,” said board chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican. “That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”Biden won Arizona by more than 10,450 votes in November, with this narrow victory in the state secured thanks to the more than 45,000 vote margin he managed in Maricopa county. Republicans, spurred on by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, then attempted to overturn this result despite no evidence presented of fraud.Earlier this year, Maricopa county hired two firms to audit its elections equipment and software, with these reviews finding no problems with the systems reviewed. This wasn’t enough for the state senate, controlled by Republicans, however, which hired Cyber Ninjas for the controversial audit.The recounting process was dogged with allegations of ballots being mishandled and cybersecurity concerns, with workers at one point using UV lights to check for bamboo fibers in ballots, part of a conspiracy theory that China had somehow planted votes into Arizona’s election. The review concluded in July.While the draft report does not claim that Trump did beat Biden in Arizona, it does criticize the state for the handling and integrity of how the election was run. Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has rejected this, stating on its Twitter feed that the report’s allegations are “littered with errors & faulty conclusions”.TopicsArizonaUS elections 2020RepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election

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      The much criticized review showed much the same results as in November, with 99 more Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump ones.PHOENIX — After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report.In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.The full review is set to be released on Friday, but draft versions circulating through Arizona political circles were obtained by The New York Times from a Republican and a Democrat.Late on Thursday night, Maricopa County, whose Republican leaders have derided the review, got a jump on the official release by tweeting out its conclusions.“The county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the county said on Twitter. It then criticized the review as “littered with errors and faulty conclusions.”Mr. Biden won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, making his victory of about 45,000 votes in Maricopa County crucial to his win. Under intense pressure from Trump loyalists, the Republican majority in the State Senate had ordered an autopsy of the county’s votes for president. The review was financed largely by $5.7 million in donations from far-right groups and Mr. Trump’s defenders.The draft reports implicitly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, noting that there were “no substantial differences” between the new tally of votes and the official count by Maricopa County election officials. But they also claimed that other factors — most if not all contested by reputable election experts — left the results “very close to the margin of error for the election.”Among other alleged discrepancies, the reports claimed that some ballots were cast by people who had moved before the election, that election-related computer files were missing and that some computer images of ballots were missing.One expert and critic of the review who had seen a draft report of the findings called those red herrings.“The whole report just reflects on the Ninjas’ lack of understanding of Arizona election law and election administration procedures,” said Benny White, a Republican in Tucson who is an adviser on election law and procedures.It was not possible to determine whether the conclusions in the final version of the report being released on Friday would differ from those in the drafts. Mr. White said he had been told that some Republican Senate officials were unhappy with the findings.But if those findings stand, they would amount to a devastating disappointment for pro-Trump Republicans nationwide who have hoped the Arizona review would vindicate their belief that the presidency was stolen from him. For many loyalists, the investigation has been seen as the first in a string of state inquiries that would, domino-like, topple claims that Mr. Biden was legitimately in the White House.State Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican who is among Arizona’s most ardent advocates of the stolen-election canard, posted on Twitter late on Thursday that the 110-page document was “simply a draft and is only a partial report,” and looked ahead to a hearing on Friday discussing the results. “Tomorrow we make history,” she wrote.On Thursday night, without acknowledging the findings of the draft reports that had been rippling across Arizona for half a day, the former president said in a statement, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”Election experts said the inquiry run by Trump partisans with unrestricted access to ballots and election equipment failed to make even a basic case that the November vote was badly flawed, much less rigged.Critics said that would raise the bar for Republican politicians in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who, under pressure from Mr. Trump and his supporters, have mounted their own Arizona-style investigations. Under similar pressure, the Texas secretary of state’s office on Thursday announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of the results from four of the state’s largest counties.“If Trump and his supporters can’t prove it here, with a process they designed, they can’t prove it anywhere,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said on Thursday.In fact, the Republican inquiry may not be completely over. Senate investigators still want to examine Maricopa County computer servers for evidence of tampering, even though county officials insist they have had no connection to election machinery.In general, however, the report was a cap-gun ending to an inquiry whose backers hinted would turn up a cannonade of fraud.Republicans in the State Senate pushed for the inquiry in December, spurred in part by a daylong meeting with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer.The Republican president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, insisted that the review was a nonpartisan effort to reassure voters that the election had been well run, but faith in that pledge ebbed after she chose Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no prior experience in elections, to oversee the inquiry.The firm’s chief executive, Doug Logan, soon was shown to have suggested on Twitter that Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona was illegitimate. Other firms and consultants hired for the inquiry also proved to have pro-Trump ties or were election conspiracy theorists.While the report’s authors declared that their monthslong review of votes in Maricopa County represented the “most comprehensive and complex election audit ever conducted,” the hand count of 2.1 million ballots and a review of voting machines and systems was plagued from the start by missteps and accusations of incompetence and partisan influence.Some elections officials said the draft reports offered an unlikely vindication of what they have been insisting for months: that Arizona ran a transparent, credible election in November.“The numbers match up,” said Adrian Fontes, who as county recorder oversaw the election in Maricopa County and is now a Democratic candidate for secretary of state.Mr. Fontes said some critiques and concerns raised in the report, such as the potential for duplicate votes, reflected a lack of knowledge about how the county conducts elections. Mr. Fontes said his office had put systems into place that reconciled in real time voter lists with records of who has voted.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More