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      Half a Year After Trump’s Defeat, Arizona Republicans Are Recounting the Vote

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      An audit of the vote in Arizona’s most populous county was meant to mollify angry Trump voters. But it is being criticized as a partisan exercise more than a fact-finding one.PHOENIX — It seemed so simple back in December.Responding to angry voters who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, Arizona Republicans promised a detailed review of the vote that showed Mr. Trump to have been the first Republican presidential nominee to lose the state since 1996. “We hold an audit,” State Senator Eddie Farnsworth said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “And then we can put this to rest.”But when a parade of flatbed trucks last week hauled boxes of voting equipment and 78 pallets containing the 2.1 million ballots of Arizona’s largest county to a decrepit local coliseum, it kicked off a seat-of-the-pants audit process that seemed more likely to amplify Republican grievances than to put them to rest.Almost half a year after the election Mr. Trump lost, the promised audit has become a snipe hunt for skulduggery that has spanned a court battle, death threats and calls to arrest the elected leadership of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.The head of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm that Republican senators hired to oversee the audit, has embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories of election theft and has suggested, contrary to available evidence, that Mr. Trump actually won Arizona by 200,000 votes. The pro-Trump cable channel One America News Network has started a fund-raiser to finance the venture and has been named one of the nonpartisan observers that will keep the audit on the straight and narrow.In fact, three previous reviews showed no sign of significant fraud or any reason to doubt President Biden’s victory. But the senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide.Critics in both parties charge that an effort that began as a way to placate angry Trump voters has become a political embarrassment and another blow to the once-inviolable democratic norm that losers and winners alike honor the results of elections.“You know the dog that caught the car?” said Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the Republican-dominated Maricopa Board of Supervisors. “The dog doesn’t know what to do with it.”After a brief pause on Friday ordered by a state court judge, the audit continues without clarity on who will do the counting, what it will cost and who will pay for the process, which is expected to last into mid-May. The One America network is livestreaming it, and Mr. Trump is cheering from the sidelines.In an email statement on Saturday, he praised the “brave American Patriots” behind the effort and demanded that Gov. Doug Ducey, a frequent target of his displeasure, dispatch the state police or National Guard for their protection.Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, a Democrat, was less enthused.“My concern grows deeper by the hour,” she said in an email on Friday. “It is clear that no one involved in this process knows what they are doing, and they are making it up as they go along.”The Senate president, Karen Fann, said in December that the audit had no hidden agenda and could not change the settled election results in Arizona, regardless of what it showed.“A lot of our constituents have a lot of questions about how the voting, the electoral system works, the security of it, the validity of it,” she said, and so the senators needed experts to examine voting processes and determine “what else could we do to verify the votes were correct and accurate.”Officials unloaded election equipment at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the state fairgrounds in Phoenix on Wednesday.Matt York/Associated PressOther state legislatures have looked into bogus claims of election fraud. But the Arizona audit, driven in part by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, is in a league of its own. Experts say it underscores the sharp rightward shift of the Legislature and the state Republican Party even as the state edges toward the political center.“I get why they’re doing it, because half of the G.O.P. believes there was widespread fraud,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix pollster who got his start in Republican politics. “The only problem is, a majority of the electorate doesn’t believe there was widespread fraud.“The longer they push this,” he said, “the more they’re alienating people in the middle.”In Arizona, the state party is headed by Kelli Ward, a former state senator who has rejected Mr. Biden’s victory and supports the audit. Under her leadership, the party in January censured Mr. Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain for being insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump.The 16 Republicans in the State Senate reflect the party’s lurch to the right. November’s elections ousted the Senate’s two most moderate Republicans, replacing one with a Democrat and another with a Republican who claims lifetime membership in the Oath Keepers, the extremist group that helped lead the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.Another self-proclaimed Oath Keeper, State Representative Mark Finchem, proposed in January to give the Legislature the power to reject presidential election results and choose new electors by a majority vote. (The proposal went nowhere). Mr. Finchem since has become a vocal backer of the audit.“The people in the Legislature are more prone to believe in the conspiracy theories and are more prone to espouse them” than in the past, said Barrett Marson, a Phoenix campaign consultant and a former Republican spokesman for the Arizona State House.Kelli Ward, the staunchly conservative chair of the Arizona Republican Party, is a strong supporter of the Maricopa County audit. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressMs. Fann, Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for interviews.The Senate’s rightward drift is simply explained, political analysts say. Most of the 30 Senate districts are so uncompetitive that the Democratic and Republican primaries effectively choose who will serve as senators. Because most voters sit out primary elections, the ones who do show up — for Republicans, that often means far-right Trump supporters — are the key to getting elected.Responding to stolen-election claims, through tougher voting laws or inquiries, is by far those voters’ top issue, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican campaign strategist in Phoenix.“They’re representing their constituency,” he said. “The whole process was built to produce this.” The senators warmed to the notion of a Maricopa County audit from the first mention of it in early December.Before long, they sent subpoenas to the county seeking the 2.1 million ballots, access to 385 voting machines and other equipment like check-in poll books, voting machine passwords and personal details on everyone who voted. The supervisors resisted, calling the election fraud-free, and said they wanted a court ruling on the subpoenas’ legality.The reaction was immediate: The four Republicans and one Democrat on the Board of Supervisors were deluged with thousands of telephone calls and emails from Trump supporters, many from out of state, some promising violence.“All five supervisors were receiving death threats,” said Mr. Gallardo, the Democratic supervisor. Two police officers were posted outside his home.Though three previous checks showed no sign of cheating, Arizona senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide. Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinHoping to head off a dispute, the supervisors hired two federally approved firms to conduct a forensic audit of the county’s voting machines. The audit concluded that the equipment had performed flawlessly.Ms. Fann, who in the past had been seen as a moderate conservative, said the Senate wanted a stricter review. Senators said they had hired “an independent, qualified forensic auditing firm” for the task.Then it developed that their selection, Allied Security Operations Group, had asserted that Arizona voting machines had been hacked in an “insidious and egregious ploy” to elect Mr. Biden.The senators backtracked, but Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County supervisors, charged in a Facebook post that they had chosen “a debunked conspiracy theorist” for the audit.Tempers flared, and all 16 Republican senators proposed to hold the supervisors in contempt, potentially sending them to jail.But that fell apart after Senator Paul Boyer, a Phoenix Republican, backed out after deciding he could not jail the supervisors for disobeying a subpoena they considered illegal.As he stood on the Senate floor explaining his stance, his cellphone began buzzing with furious texts and emails. Some were threatening; some mentioned his wife’s workplace and their toddler son.“It was like, ‘You’d better watch your back — we’re coming for you,’” Mr. Boyer said. The family spent days in hiding before returning home with a 24-hour police guard.Just two weeks later, on Feb. 27, a county court ruled the Senate subpoenas legal.Workers tabulating ballot results at the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix on Nov. 5.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Senate, seemingly caught unawares, initially refused to accept delivery of the subpoenaed material for lack of a secure place to store it. Officials rented a local coliseum, but the county sheriff’s office refused to provide security, calling the job outside its scope. The second firm hired to analyze the audit results, Cyber Ninjas, says it is an industry leader. But The Arizona Republic soon reported that the company’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had posted a litany of stolen-election conspiracy theories on a Twitter account that he had deleted in January.Among them was a retweeted post suggesting that Dominion Voting Systems, a favorite target of the right, had robbed Mr. Trump of 200,000 votes in Arizona. Dominion says Cyber Ninjas is “led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters who have helped spread the “Big Lie” of a rigged election.Mr. Logan, at a news conference last week said the company was committed to a fair, transparent process. “It’s really, really important to us that we have integrity in the way we do this count and in the results that come out of it,” he told reporters. Ms. Fann has said that the firm and others it will oversee are “well qualified and well experienced.”But unease about the audit has continued to mushroom. Ms. Hobbs, the secretary of state, asked the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to investigate the Senate’s handling of the procedure, citing a lack of transparency about security of ballots. She noted that some of the Legislature’s furthest-right firebrands have had free access to the coliseum even as it remained unclear whether reporters and impartial election experts would be allowed to observe the proceedings.He declined.Greg Burton, the executive editor of The Arizona Republic, said in a statement on Friday that “Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists.”Amid the growing uproar, the Republican senators who have approved and stood behind the audit since its beginning have largely been silent about concerns over its integrity.Alain Delaquérière and Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      Arizona Judge Halts (for Now) G.O.P. Recount of 2020 Ballots

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      A Maricopa County judge on Friday temporarily halted a Republican-led effort in Arizona to recount ballots from the 2020 presidential election, after Democrats filed a lawsuit arguing that the audit violated state election security laws.But the judge, Christopher Coury of Maricopa County Superior Court, said the pause would go into effect only if the state Democratic Party posted a $1 million bond to compensate a private company — Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm based in Florida — that Republicans have hired to review the ballots.In a statement on Friday afternoon, Democratic officials said they would not do so, but they vowed to continue the fight in court. Another hearing was set for Monday morning, and the judge emphasized that he expected the audit to move forward.Republican State Senate officials hired Cyber Ninjas to review nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa, the state’s largest county, though there is no substantiated evidence of significant fraud or errors. Election officials and local courts have found no merit in the allegations, and the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors has also objected to the recount.The lawsuit, brought by the state Democratic Party and Maricopa County’s only Democratic supervisor, argues that the State Senate is violating Arizona laws and regulations over the confidentiality and handling of election materials, and questions whether Senate officials can contract audit-related activities to private third-party vendors.Julia Shumway contributed reporting from Phoenix. More

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      Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections

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      Not content with limiting voting rights, they are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger’s successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.Even those who have not been stripped of power have been censured by Republican Party organizations, including not just Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but also Barbara Cegavske, the Republican secretary of state of Nevada who ran a fair election and rejected spurious arguments that the election was stolen. The message that these actions send to politicians is that if you want a future in state Republican politics, you had better be willing to manipulate election results or lie about election fraud.Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but also to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Law Forward and the States United Democracy Center, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.Combating efforts that can undermine the fair administration of elections and vote counting is especially tricky. Unlike issues of voter suppression, which are easy to explain to the public (what do you mean you can’t give water to voters waiting in long lines?!?), the risks of unfair election administration are inchoate. They may materialize or they may not, depending on how close an election is and whether Mr. Trump himself or another person running for office is willing to break democratic norms and insist on an unfair vote count.So what can be done? To begin with, every jurisdiction in the United States should be voting with systems that produce a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a disputed election. Having physical, tangible evidence of voters’ choices, rather than just records on electronic voting machines, is essential to both guard against actual manipulation and protect voter confidence in a fair vote count. Such a provision is already contained in H.R. 1, the mammoth Democrat-sponsored voting bill.Next, businesses and civic leaders must speak out not just against voter suppression but also at efforts at election subversion. The message needs to be that fair elections require not just voter access to the polls but also procedures to ensure that the means of conducting the election are fair, auditable and verifiable by representatives of both political parties and nongovernmental organizations.Congress must also fix the rules for counting Electoral College votes, so that spurious objections to the vote counts like the ones we saw on Jan. 6 from senators and representatives, including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, are harder to make. It should take much more than a pairing of a single senator and a single representative to raise an objection, and there must be quick means to reject frivolous objections to votes fairly cast and counted in the states.Congress can also require states to impose basic safeguards in the counting of votes in federal elections. This is not part of the H.R. 1 election reform bill, but it should be, and Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress wide berth to override state laws in this area.Finally, we need a national effort to support those who will count votes fairly. Already we are seeing a flood of competent election administrators retiring from their often-thankless jobs, some after facing threats of violence during the 2020 vote count. Local election administrators need political cover and the equivalent of combat pay, along with adequate budget resources to run fair elections. It took hundreds of millions of dollars in private philanthropy to hold a successful election in 2020; that need for charity should not be repeated.If someone running for secretary of state endorses the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, they should be uniformly condemned. Support should go to those who promote election integrity, regardless of party, and who put in place fair and transparent procedures. Ultimately, we need to move toward a more nonpartisan administration of elections and create incentives for loyalty to the integrity of the democratic process, not to a political party.We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion. That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now. It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”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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      Fight to vote: Arizona county’s ‘ludicrous’ election audit

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,The baseless conspiracy theories that Donald Trump spread about the 2020 election are about to have some of their starkest real-world consequences to date in Arizona.Republicans in the Arizona state senate are set to begin an unprecedented audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county, the most populous of the state, this week. Part of the audit will consist of a hand recount of all 2.1m votes cast for president there.Voting rights advocates told me they’re deeply concerned about the audit for a few reasons. First, they said, Maricopa county has already performed two audits of the election and found no irregularities in the vote. Second, the effort is being led by a Florida-based firm with a CEO who voiced support for election conspiracies after the election. Third, the audit will probably only breathe new life into Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race in Arizona.Republicans in the legislature will likely use that uncertainty to justify new voting restrictions. One expert I spoke with said the entire effort seemed so shoddy that he was hesitant to even call it an “audit”.“It’s ludicrous,” the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told me this week. “We cannot set a precedent where people that are mad can just bring this on every election. It’s just not how we do things.”There are a ton of other important concerns. Private donors, reportedly including rightwing lawyer L Lin Wood, are helping finance the effort. And a spokesman for the audit told a reporter for the Arizona Mirror this week that there would be significant restrictions in place for reporters who covered the event.The Maricopa county board of supervisors, which is controlled by Republicans, isn’t on board with the effort. It agreed to turn over ballots and election equipment after Republicans got a court order, but refused to allow the audit to take place in a county-owned facility. Republicans are now paying to rent out an entire stadium to conduct the audit.“This audit, it seems as if they are seeking a predetermined outcome. They want to find fraud,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the state senate. “They need to find fraud in order to justify all of their actions and in order to keep this radical wing of their constituency happy. They need to find fraud. So they are intent on finding it.”Also worth watching …
      The Senate confirmed Vanita Gupta to be the associate attorney general, placing one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers in the number three role at the justice department.
      Florida Republicans are advancing legislation to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting, despite objections from election officials across the state, including Republicans. The move to curtail mail-in voting in Florida is notable because the state has been held up as a national example – including by Trump – of how to successfully run a vote-by-mail system.
      Montana Republicans enacted a law that ends same-day voter registration in the state and another that tightens ID requirements for voting. Democrats are already challenging the measure. More

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      Arizona Republicans to begin auditing 2020 ballots in effort to undermine election results

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      Nearly five months after Joe Biden was declared the official winner of the presidential race in Arizona, state Republicans are set to begin their own audit of millions of ballots, an unprecedented move many see as a thinly-veiled effort to continue to undermine confidence in the 2020 election results.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe GOP-controlled state senate ordered the audit, set to formally get underway this week, which may be one of the most absurd and alarming consequences to date of Donald Trump’s baseless lies about the 2020 election. It will be executed by a private Florida-based company. It also reportedly will be supported from far-right lawyer Lin Wood and observers from the far-right news network One America News Network.The audit will be solely focused on Maricopa county, the largest in the state and home to a majority of Arizona’s voters. Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the county, a crucial battleground that helped the president win Arizona by around 10,000 votes. The audit will include a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots cast in the county, a process expected to take months.Trump and allies have claimed, without evidence, there was fraud in Maricopa county. But the county has already conducted two separate audits of the 2020 election and found no irregularities. The Republican decision to continue to investigate the results, months after they were certified by both county and state officials, extends the life of election conspiracy theories. The audit also comes as Arizona Republicans are advancing legislation in the state that would make it harder to vote by mail.“They’re trying to find something that we know doesn’t exist,” said Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who serves as the state’s top election official. “It’s ludicrous that people think that if they don’t like the results they can just come in and tear them apart.”David Becker, an election administration expert and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the effort was so shoddy he was hesitant to acknowledge it as a legitimate investigation.“I’ve never seen an ‘audit’ that was remotely similar, and given the fundamental flaws, I don’t think this process can even be described as an audit,” he said in an email.Other voting rights groups have expressed similar concerns.“At this point, additional audits will have little value other than to stoke conspiracy theories and partisan gamesmanship – or worse,” the groups, which included the Carter Center in Atlanta and the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote in a letter to the Arizona senate earlier this month. “In short, this appears to be a decision driven by politics rather than a search for the truth.”Alarm over the audit has escalated in recent weeks after Republicans announced the firms that would be leading the effort. The company that will lead the audit, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, is led by Doug Logan, who supported several baseless conspiracy theories about the election. In December, he retweeted a post that questioned the validity of Maricopa’s ballot count and falsely said Trump may have gotten 200,000 more votes than were reported in Arizona, according to the Arizona Mirror, which first reported his involvement in the audit.He also made statistical comparisons between elections in Venezuela and the 2020 race in a tweet that included a “stop the steal” hashtag, according to the Mirror. Cyber Ninjas is not accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission to inspect voting machines, the Washington Post reported.“You’re bringing in this firm that’s on a treasure hunt,” Hobbs said. “They are not qualified, they don’t even know what they’re doing.”It’s not clear how Cyber Ninjas was chosen to lead the audit. Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona senate, did not return a request for comment. In an interview with One America News Network, a far right news outlet, Fann said the audit was needed to answer questions about the 2020 election.“It is our job to make sure those laws are followed to the T, that they are always above reproach, and if we find any mistakes, we need to fix it and or report it,” she told the outlet.The Arizona state senate is renting a Phoenix arena to conduct the audit and there is growing scrutiny over how the process is being funded. While the state senate has allocated $150,000 towards the effort, it is also being backed by private donors. L Lin Wood, an attorney who promoted some of the most inflammatory lies about the 2020 election, told Talking Points Memo he had donated $50,000 to a fundraiser to support the effort. Wood also told the outlet that he hosted Logan at his South Carolina home last year.“That should scare a lot of people,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the Arizona state senate. “Who are the people that are gonna be donating to this? It’s already shown that this is the people who have an agenda and that agenda is to show that there was some sort of fraud, that there was a stolen election.”It’s also unclear how much access media and other independent observers will have to the audit. Reporters will be prohibited from using pens and paper and will have to sign up to serve as official observers, a spokesman for the audit told an Arizona Mirror reporter on Wednesday. The Arizona Republican party also tweeted that the process will be live-streamed and that observers from One America News Network, the far fight outlet, would ensure nonpartisan “transparency”.There is also concern the audit could lead to voter intimidation. In its statement of work, Cyber Ninjas wrote it had already performed “non-partisan canvassing” in Arizona after the 2020 election and knocked on voters’ doors to “confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address”. The company said it would continue that work during the audit “to validate that individuals that show as having voted in the 2020 general election match those individuals who believe they have cast a vote”.Such activity could amount to illegal voter intimidation, a group of voting rights lawyers wrote to Cyber Ninjas and others involved in the audit earlier this month.Quezada, the Arizona state senator, said it was impossible to separate the audit from the suite of voting restrictions in the Arizona state legislature that would make it harder to vote by mail. Among the most prominent is a bill that would essentially do away with a longstanding and popular practice in the state that allows any eligible voter in the state to automatically receive a mail-in ballot if they want. Another measure would require voters to provide identification with their mail-in ballot.“They want to justify all of the changes that they are already proposing to election laws because they need to have some sort of legitimacy behind it to justify the severe restrictions they’re hoping to put in place here,” he said. “Every element of this audit, from the beginning, to the end, it just stinks to high hell.” More

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      Joe Arpaio: inside the fallout of Trump’s pardon

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      Late August 2017 was supposed to be a celebratory time for Joe Arpaio. The former Maricopa county sheriff had just received Donald Trump’s first presidential pardon after being found guilty of criminal contempt of court.The pardon meant Arpaio was spared a criminal sentence for a federal misdemeanor that could have included up to six months in prison. At a family dinner at a local restaurant the night he received it, he was barely able to touch his linguine with clams and calamari – he had been too busy fielding congratulatory phone calls and media inquiries.But Trump’s pardon could not redeem the political brand of Arpaio, then 85, who was once known as “America’s toughest sheriff,” nor would it help the president’s own long-term popularity in Arizona. Arizona’s electorate was changing, quickly. The state’s extreme immigration laws and Arpaio’s style of enforcement – which in both cases, federal courts had found some aspects unconstitutional – had inspired an energetic, grassroots resistance movement that was reshaping the politics of the state.Instead of having his reputation reinstated with the Trump pardon, Arpaio was met with a fierce backlash. “I’ve got two new titles now,” Arpaio told us weeks after he was pardoned. “‘The disgraced sheriff,’ that’s everywhere, ‘disgraced sheriff.’ And the other one is ‘racist.’ … I lost my ‘America’s toughest sheriff’ title.”Elected sheriff of Maricopa county – which includes Phoenix and Arizona’s most populous county – in 1992, Arpaio once was one of the state’s most popular politicians.He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father, Ciro Arpaio, an Italian citizen, had immigrated to the US in the 1920s, a time when many Americans viewed Italian immigrants as criminally inclined, disease-spreading, job-stealing, shifty, swarthy-skinned invaders.As a child, Arpaio said, he took in the anti-immigrant taunts, and pretended to ignore them. That’s what you did back then, he said.The immigrant’s son grew up to be an unapologetic immigration enforcer, delivering the hardline policies that a growing base of Republican voters in Arizona supported. His deputies helped turn tens of thousands of immigrants over to Ice for deportation. They rounded up day laborers, raided businesses to bust unauthorized immigrant employees working with fake papers, and swarmed neighborhoods where they arrested undocumented drivers and passengers found after stopping cars for minor traffic infractions.His tactics had helped nurture a climate of vitriol against Mexican immigrants in Maricopa county, not so unlike the anti-immigrant hate he had experienced first-hand. Arpaio launched an immigration hotline in 2007 “for citizens to report illegal aliens.” Sheriff’s office records show the move unleashed a flood of tips.County residents wanted Arpaio to investigate their immigrant neighbors and check out a local McDonald’s where the staff suspiciously spoke Spanish. An anonymous hotline caller expressed a desire to “shoot” a Mexican-born activist who was one of Arpaio’s vocal critics, “if I could get away with it.”Arizona’s bitter immigration wars, and Arpaio’s role in them, helped his political brand – for a time. He had been re-elected to a fifth term, his last, in 2012 when he was 80. But his immigration stance led to his political downfall the following election cycle.In 2016, a Latino-led grassroots movement that had spent the previous decade protesting the sheriff’s immigration enforcement tactics, collecting evidence for lawsuits, empowering immigrant communities to know their rights, and registering new voters, had focused their energy on their biggest voter mobilization drive yet. Young people, who had come of age fearing Arpaio’s deputies might deport their immigrant family members, had become eligible voters and registered others.At the same time, moderate Republicans, irritated by Arpaio’s mounting legal fees and controversies, had backed his Democratic challenger. Even as Maricopa county voters helped Trump win the presidency, they rejected their longtime sheriff.Meanwhile, Arpaio was facing legal backlash. Along the years, Arpaio had ignored a federal judge’s order that barred his law enforcement agency from detaining undocumented immigrants who had not been suspected or accused of crimes – and turning them over for deportation.In 2016, the Obama administration’s justice department had announced plans to prosecute Arpaio for criminal contempt of court.Trump’s 2017 pardon provided relief, and hope for a political rebirth. “He is loved in Arizona,” Trump told reporters of Arpaio days after the pardon. “Sheriff Joe protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe was very unfairly treated by the Obama administration, especially right before an election – an election that he would have won.”It did not take long, however, for legal scholars, newspaper editorial boards and historians to pen the rebuke, labeling the pardon an abuse of power, an impeachable offense, unconstitutional, a dog whistle to white supremacists in Trump’s base, cronyism, or any combination of these.“Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great,” read an editorial in the Arizona Republic.The same piece called a federal judge’s guilty verdict against Arpaio “a dose of hard-won justice for a too-flamboyant sheriff who showed little respect for the constitution as he made national news as an immigration hardliner – and let real crimes go uninvestigated.”News outlets revisited years worth of negative coverage about Arpaio, including a class action federal lawsuit filed a decade earlier, in which Latino motorists in Maricopa county had shown that Arpaio’s immigration tactics had violated their civil rights and resulted in racial profiling.By September 2017, it seemed the controversy had left Arpaio surprised, angry and bewildered.“I’m not a racist,” he told us. “You know that. Everybody knows that.”When Arpaio now checked his email, he said, he found a message that called him a “Sicko. Sadist. Depraved vile criminal,” and expressed cruel, violent wishes. Another letter used anti-Italian slurs to address him as a “Fat, Greaseball Dago Piece of Shit,” and referred to the author’s desire to one day “piss on that WOP grave of yours”.In January 2018, Arpaio announced he would run for an open US Senate seat in that year’s election. But he had lost his once loyal Republican base. He came in third place out of three candidates in the GOP primary.I think the defeat of Arpaio made it tangible that we can defeat the villains that haunt our dreamsEven though Arpaio was sidelined in the 2018 election, his legacy continued to galvanize activists and voters. From 2014 to 2018, Latino voter turnout in Arizona jumped from 32% to 49%. In those four years, a few Latino activists who had organized against Arpaio and Arizona’s spate of extreme immigration laws, won seats as Democrats in the Arizona statehouse, chipping away at the Republican majorities. The Latino vote helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeat the Republican Martha McSally for the Senate seat that Arpaio had wanted.Some on the ground organizers credited the surge in Latino turnout in part to voters seeing Arpaio’s defeat two years earlier.Alejandra Gomez, a Mexican American activist with Living United for Change in Arizona who helped mobilize voters in 2016 and 2018, said seeing Arpaio lose and a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage pass had helped convince some first time voters the following election cycle that the act of voting could make a difference.“Every step of the way we have been saying we are going to fight for our community. By that point – we actually delivered,” Gomez said.That same momentum, Gomez predicted at the time, would spill over to the next presidential cycle in 2020.“We demonstrated that it is possible to defeat someone like Arpaio, so it is possible also to defeat someone like Trump,” she said.Still Arpaio’s political ambitions weren’t over. In 2020, he ran for his old job as sheriff in the Republican primary. He crisscrossed the county in a campaign bus plastered with a photo of him with Trump and the slogan, “Make Maricopa county safe again.” The race was close, but again he lost.Meanwhile, the grassroots organizers who had learned how to inspire voters in their fight against Arpaio channeled their energy to mobilizing voters of color.Arizona voters by a narrow margin, picked a Democrat for president for only the second time since 1952, helping cement Joe Biden’s win and Trump’s defeat. Democrat Mark Kelly won his race for a US Senate seat.Maria Castro, a 27-year-old Mexican American activist who first began registering new Latino voters in Maricopa county as a high schooler in 2011, noticed the people whose doors she knocked on in 2020 were unusually eager to vote.“This time around, people were like, ‘Yes, we’re ready to get rid of Trump,’ ” Castro told us. “I think the defeat of Arpaio made it tangible that we can defeat the villains that haunt our dreams.”Arpaio, now 88, may have lost his last three races, but he is holding out hope that the same will not hold true for the man he calls his hero, Trump. “I got beat, came right around and ran again,” Arpaio told us. “So I would like to see him run again.”
      Jude Joffe-Block and Terry Greene Sterling are the authors of DRIVING WHILE BROWN: Sheriff Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance, a new book that tells the story of Arpaio’s rise and fall as the sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county and the determined Latino resistance that fought his unconstitutional policing. Driving While Brown is published by University of California Press and is available on 20 April. More

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      in US Politics

      The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterAs Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states.Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail.Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures.After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said those statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Gutierrez has been involved in fights over voting rights for more than a decade and said he could not recall another instance where there was the kind of broad opposition to the bills that exists now.“A lot of us are thinking that Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is all these prominent voices weighing in are coming in much earlier,” he said.Attention on Texas, one of the lowest-ranking states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers advanced a measure that appears squarely aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand voting access. In addition to blocking drive-thru and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in Harris county, home to Houston, in 2020, the law also prevents officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In addition the bill imposes new requirements on people who assist voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in allocating election equipment.The measures would clearly empower partisan poll watchers. One measure allows poll watchers to record voters at the polls if they “reasonably believe” they are receiving illegal assistance. Another provision makes it harder for local officials in charge of an election precinct to remove poll watchers during voting.“It is a huge deal because of how many incidents we see in Texas of poll watchers misbehaving and needing to be disrupted for a good reason,” Gutierrez said.Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen“This is an invasion of privacy, it’s an invasion of ballot secrecy, it could be potentially very intimidating,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials across the country. “Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen.”In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing a slew of anti-voting measures. One priority is a bill that would make changes to a list voters can join to automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to enable the state to remove voters from the list if they don’t vote by mail in at least two consecutive elections. About 200,000 voters who didn’t vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.“This is a really important piece of our election system. It’s been in place just like it is for more than a decade. People trust it, they love using it,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, which is lobbying against many of the proposed changes. “This year, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw going into and after the election, Republicans in the state legislature are attacking it.”Advocates are also concerned about another bill that would require voters to provide either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when they return a mail-in ballot (Arizona currently uses signature comparison to verify the identity of mail-in voters). Those requirements would pose difficulties for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, a Native vote fellow at Indian law clinic at Arizona State University.Dolan said that it can be difficult to find out a voter registration number online and noted that the bill currently did not allow for the use of tribal identification cards as a form of identification. Many Indigenous elders, she noted, were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates, and therefore have approximate birthdays.“Arizona election law, before this cycle, was not equally accessible to Native Americans,” she said. “As more barriers go up, it only exacerbates that gap from access.”Aside from legislation, Arizona Republicans are also moving ahead with more efforts to stoke uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The state senate, controlled by Republicans, is moving ahead with a recount and audit of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous, months after the state certified the election. The county has already completed an audit of its voting equipment, which found ballots were counted correctly.One of the four firms the senate hired to lead the audit is led by Doug Logan, who has publicly said he believes there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 and advanced other conspiracy theories about the election, according to the Arizona Mirror.“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin in 2016 in a state senate, had decided they wanted to, six months after an election, start an audit of the ballots of an election that was already certified and the people were already in office?” Becker said.“And then they hired the consultant, someone from out of state who had publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? That’s a mirror image of what’s happening in Arizona right now.” More

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      in Elections

      For Voting Rights Advocates, a ‘Once in a Generation Moment’ Looms

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor Voting Rights Advocates, a ‘Once in a Generation Moment’ LoomsOpposition to restrictive Republican voting laws — and support for a sweeping Democratic bill — fuels a movement like none in decades. But can it succeed?Protesters demonstrating against proposed changes to Georgia’s voting laws, this month in Atlanta.Credit…Ben Gray/Associated PressNicholas Fandos and March 15, 2021Updated 9:53 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — State and national voting-rights advocates are waging the most consequential political struggle over access to the ballot since the civil rights era, a fight increasingly focused on a far-reaching federal overhaul of election rules in a last-ditch bid to offset a wave of voting restrictions sweeping Republican-controlled state legislatures.The federal voting bill, which passed in the House this month with only Democratic support, includes a landmark national expansion of voting rights, an end to partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and new transparency requirements on the flood of dark money financing elections that would override the rash of new state laws.The energy in support for it radiates from well-financed veteran organizers to unpaid volunteers, many who were called to political activism after former President Donald J. Trump’s upset win in 2016. It is engaging Democrats in Washington and voting rights activists in crucial states from Georgia to Iowa to West Virginia to Arizona — some facing rollbacks in access to the ballot, some with senators who will play pivotal roles and some with both.But after approval of the Democratic bill in the House, the campaign to pass the For the People Act, designated Senate Bill 1, increasingly appears to be on a collision course with the filibuster. The rule requires 60 votes for passage of most legislation in a bitterly divided Senate, meaning that Republicans can kill the voting bill and scores of other liberal priorities despite unified Democratic control of Washington.To succeed, Democrats will have to convince a handful of moderate holdouts to change the rules, at least for this legislation, with the likelihood that a single defection in their own party would doom their efforts. It is a daunting path with no margin for error, but activists believe the costs for failure, given the Republican limits on voting, would be so high that some accommodation on the filibuster could become inevitable.Two left-leaning elections groups, the advocacy arm of End Citizens United and Let America Vote along with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, plan this week to announce an infusion of $30 million to try to hasten the groundswell. The money will fund paid advertising in at least a dozen states and finance organizers to target Democratic and Republican swing senators in six of them.“We are at a once-in-a-generation moment,” said Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United and Let America Vote. “We either are going to see one of the most massive rollbacks of our democracy in generations, or we have an opportunity to say: ‘No, that is not what America stands for. We are going to strengthen democracy and make sure everyone has an equal voice.’”The sense of a pivotal moment is the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on. Republicans are still inflamed by Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election and the party’s unified message that voting restrictions, many of which fall most heavily on minorities and Democratic-leaning voters, are needed to prevent fraud, which studies have repeatedly shown to barely exist.“This bill is the opposite of good governance — it’s a cynical attempt by the left to put their thumb on the scales of democracy and engineer our laws to help them win elections,” said Dan Conston, president of the Republican-aligned American Action Network. “They want to limit free speech, funnel public funds into their campaign accounts, seize from states the ability to run their own free and fair elections, and then spin it like this is really all about protecting voting rights.”Ms. Muller and others are ostensibly focused on winning support for election legislation from 10 moderate Republican senators, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan M. Collins of Maine.But with Republican leaders promising near-unanimous opposition in the Senate, Democrats and their allies are positioning voting rights as the most persuasive case for scrapping or changing the filibuster that would limit much of Democrats’ legislative agenda.Voting rights groups are hoping to sway moderate senators like Lisa Murkowski, left, and Susan Collins toward supporting the federal voting bill. Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times“It is too important an issue and we are facing too big a crisis to let an arcane procedural motion hold back the passage of this bill,” Ms. Muller said. She argued that the rollback of voting rights was an existential threat to the democracy on which all other liberal causes, from gun control to health care reform, depend.The urgency for federal action has mounted not just among Washington lobbyists and Democratic lawmakers, but grass roots groups that normally fight battles in state legislatures and city councils. Many spent the winter opposing the Republican voting agenda that included curbs on mail-in and early voting and stiffer voter ID requirements.Lawmakers in Republican-controlled states have largely rebuffed those groups, leaving Democrats to see federal action as the only possible brake on widespread voting restrictions. At the same time, a handful of crucial Republican-led states are preparing to draw new state and congressional district maps in the fall that could further tilt power in their direction and lock Democrats out of a House majority for years.Voting-rights proponents say they have not given up on stopping restrictive laws in states. The Arizona group Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, has already registered 2,000 people this year to testify remotely on proposed state legislation, with voting rights as a priority.“People are up in arms,” said Cathy Kouts Sigmon, the group’s founder. “They’re relating these bills to how they vote and how members of their family vote.”Voting-rights advocates in Georgia, who claim to have slowed or killed some restrictive bills, are aiming at local companies that have supported the bills’ sponsors, including Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines and UPS. An advertising campaign led by voting and civil rights groups demands that the firms use their lobbying muscle in the Georgia statehouse to stop repressive voting bills instead of contributing to their Republican authors.“They spent most of Black History Month peppering us with Martin Luther King quotes, but now that Blacks’ future is in jeopardy, they’re silent,” Nsé Ufot, the chief executive of one participant, the New Georgia Project, said last week. “We’re using digital ads, billboards, direct action at warehouses and call centers — we’re serious. This is urgent.”One possible sign of some success: On Sunday, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, whose members include those companies, expressed “concern and opposition” to restrictive clauses in two Republican bills.Nsé Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, speaking in Atlanta in November.Credit…Marcus Ingram/Getty Images for MoveonIncreasingly, though, the focus is on federal legislation. Ms. Sigmon’s group is recruiting Arizonans to lobby their senators on the elections bill. So are local chapters of Indivisible, a movement founded in response to Mr. Trump’s election, in Georgia and Arizona.And so have national advocacy groups. Common Cause runs weeknight phone banks recruiting backers for the bill, and says it has generated 700,000 text messages supporting it. “It’s been a pretty incredible outpouring of support, because we all know what this moment means,” said Izzy Bronstein, the group’s national campaigns manager. In Phoenix, the advocacy group Progress Arizona coordinates a statewide campaign to persuade Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a first-term Democrat, to drop her support of the filibuster. Among its tactics: billboards projected at night onto buildings and other spots, calling for an end to the filibuster and displaying the senator’s Capitol Hill phone number.In Charleston, W. Va., Takeiya Smith of the advocacy group For West Virginia’s Future works with some 70 students at six state colleges to generate calls on Senate Bill 1 to Senators Shelley Capito, a Republican, and particularly Joe Manchin III, a Democrat whose support for the filibuster is a liberal target. The group plans daily campus events this week highlighting different parts of the measure. It is in turn allied with a national coalition, the Declaration for American Democracy, that has enrolled 190 organizations to push for its passage.In Atlanta, the Black Voters Matter Fund is preparing with other groups a national campaign for Senate Bill 1 aimed at both senators and President Biden, who has expressed hope for the bill’s passage but has not actively worked for it.“He’s got to have his Lyndon B. Johnson moment,” said Cliff Albright, the group’s executive director, referring to the former president’s arm-twisting on Capitol Hill for the Voting Rights Act in 1965. “You’re president of the United States. You need to do more than hope that it passes,” he said of Mr. Biden. “He needs to use everything he’s learned over 47 years in Washington, D.C., to get this bill passed.”Democrats first introduced the elections bill in 2019 as a catchall measure to address growing public disillusionment with dark money and corporate interests in politics. But as Republican state officials have raced to target voter participation, the bill’s voting provisions have increasingly been viewed by many on the left as essential protections to American democracy — and to the ability of Democratic voters to cast ballots.If it became law, the bill would drastically expand early and mail-in voting, neuter restrictive state voter ID laws, make it harder to purge voter rolls while automatically registering all eligible voters and restoring voting rights to former felons. Those and other changes would most likely increase voter participation, especially by minority voters who disproportionately lean Democratic.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic caucus promoted the party’s legislation on voting this month.Credit…J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressSenators plan to reintroduce the bill this week and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Senate committee that will advance it, has promised a hearing on March 24.But what happens next is a matter of hot political and strategic debate centered on Democrats’ fight over the filibuster, where a handful of moderates so far appear unwilling to change or drop the tactic. All 50 Democrats probably would have to agree to alter the rules.In an interview, Ms. Klobuchar suggested that if senators could not agree to scrap the filibuster altogether, they could try to find a compromise, potentially allowing measures on voting and elections like Senate Bill 1 to pass with a simple majority, but not other bills.“It is so fundamental to everything else, it has to get done,” she said.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has been less definitive but indicated last week that he, too, may view voting rights as a unique case. “If we can get some bipartisan support, great, but if not, our caucus will meet and we will figure out how to get it done,” he said in a radio interview. “Failure is not an option.”End Citizens United, Let America Vote and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee plan to run television and digital ads in Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Maine and Pennsylvania, homes to several key swing senators. A later phase will target up to 15 red and blue states. The groups will also dispatch 50 paid staff members to states, including Mr. Manchin’s West Virginia.“We almost don’t have a choice,” said Kelly Ward Burton, president of the Democratic redistricting group. “Because of what’s happening in the states, it’s not theoretical. It’s happening right before our eyes. It would be irresponsible not to do anything about this.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More