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      Arizona ballot audit backed by secretive donors linked to Trump’s inner circle

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      Dark money groups tied to Donald Trump’s inner circle and backed by people who have spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election appear to be playing a key role in funding an unprecedented review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona.Republicans in the Arizona state senate, which authorized the inquiry, allocated $150,000 in state funds to pay for it – just a fraction of the projected overall cost, which is still unknown. The state senate had enough money in its operating budget to pay for the investigation, the Arizona Mirror reported in April, but chose not to pay the full price.Instead, the effort is being paid for by private donors, who remain hidden from the public, according to a review by OpenSecrets and the Guardian. Arizona Republicans and Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company overseeing the review, have refused to say who is providing the rest of the money.“It is wholly inappropriate that the Arizona state senate is hiding the mechanisms by which their sanctioned activity is being funded,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who served as the top election official in Maricopa county, the target of the ballot review, until he lost his re-election bid last year. “The lack of transparency there is just grotesque.”*Questions about funds come as the Arizona senate has faced scrutiny for why it hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with little experience in auditing elections to oversee its massive review. Doug Logan, the firm’s chief executive, expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona state senate, said last year she received a phone call from Trump thanking her for “pushing to prove any fraud”, according to emails obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group. Fann, a Republican, also said she had spoken with Rudy Giuliani, a Trump ally, multiple times last year.At least $150,000 of the inquiry’s funding has purportedly come from Voices and Votes, a 501(c)(4) run by Christina Bobb, an anchor for the One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing media network that has given air to election conspiracy theories. The group is also run with the White House correspondent Chanel Rion and Courtland Sykes, Rion’s fiance. Bobb spoke with Trump about the review, according to the Washington Post, and emailed Fann affidavits on behalf of Giuliani last year, emails show.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterBobb frequently plugs the effort during shows, where she covers the Arizona review, and on social media, but told BuzzFeed that OANN is not “in any way” affiliated with her fundraising despite the dark money group being run by multiple OANN employees and being promoted on the network. Voices and Votes was incorporated in Wyoming in March, shortly before the inquiry was announced, by Greg Roeberg, an Arizona attorney. A press release from the Trump campaign last year listed a Greg Roeberg as a “key member” of Jewish Voices for Trump. Roeberg said in an email he was not involved with the charity beyond helping it with the initial legal papers. The group declined an interview request.L Lin Wood, the pro-Trump attorney behind a slew of lawsuits seeking to overturn election results last year, told Talking Points Memo that his non-profit, Fight Back, donated $50,000 to Voices and Votes for the review. But it is not clear what the money is actually going to since the groups are subject to few financial disclosure rules.Wood, who has promoted fundraising efforts for the review on Telegram, also told TPM that Cyber Ninja chief Logan worked out of Wood’s home to investigate 2020 election voter fraud claims.Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and an ardent Trump supporter, is also leading a group funding the effort. Byrne was involved in what Axios described as the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” – a December 2020 summit in the Oval Office that included Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell, who falsely claimed voting machines had flipped votes for Trump and suggested he use government resources to seize voting machines. Byrne also reportedly screamed at representatives from the White House counsel’s office, saying they were not sufficiently helping to overturn the election.In April, Byrne’s non-profit, the America Project, launched a Fund the Audit campaign aiming to raise $2.8m. Byrne says he contributed $1m to the effort, but at least another $900,000 has come from unknown sources. Byrne’s non-profit is also helping vet workers who participate in the review, according to the Arizona Republic.Byrne also served as chief of another dark money group involved in the review, Defending the Republic, though he claims he resigned in April. Created by Powell, Defending the Republic published every Arizona lawmaker’s contact info on their website and promoted a misleading “Election Fraud Facts & Details“ document authored for the Arizona senate by Cyber Ninja’s Logan before the “audit” effort. The document contains disproven claims about voting machine software switching votes from Trump to Biden.Powell’s group also previously hired Wake Technology Services, Inc (Wake TSI), a subcontractor, to audit election equipment in Fulton county, Pennsylvania, at the request of Doug Mastriano, a state senator who aggressively suggested the election was stolen, according to county documents obtained by the Guardian.Paula Shives, a Democrat on the three-member county commission, was stunned that the company was allowed to inspect election materials last year. “Who authorized this? When was this scheduled? Who was notified and present during the process?” Shives wrote in a text message to the country’s election director and two commissioners that was obtained by OpenSecrets and the Guardian through a public records request.The lack of transparency there is just grotesqueRandy Bunch, a Republican county commissioner, replied that the review did not show any problems: “On a good note, they didn’t find one thing wrong and praise our team meaning Patty and our staff on how organized everything was and we come [sic] out with no flaws it all matched up.”Wake TSI submitted a draft report to county officials in February that appeared to back up that assessment, according to the Washington Post.But the copy of that Pennsylvania review uploaded on the county website contended Dominion Voting Systems did not meet the state’s certification requirements, documented “errors” in scanning ballots, and purportedly identified “non-certified” software installed in the county’s voting system. (Wake TSI did not respond to requests for an interview.)Wake TSI abruptly withdrew from the Arizona review in May, and it is unclear why. Mastriano was one of several Pennsylvania lawmakers who visited the audit site in early June, where he was interviewed by Bobb on OANN.*For weeks, observers have pointed out that the procedures in place for the unprecedented inquiry are shoddy and do not resemble a neutral audit. But Trump has also become increasingly focused on the Arizona review and possible similar efforts elsewhere. Trump has reportedly told people close to him he expects to be “reinstated” as president this summer – something that would be impossible under the current legal system.The influx of private funds comes as Republicans themselves, including in Arizona, have pushed to outlaw the use of private grants for election processes after charities stepped up to fund underresourced election officials during the pandemic. In particular, Republicans have targeted grants from organizations backed by hundreds of millions dollars of donations from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.In April, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a law prohibiting election officials from accepting private money to help run elections, saying it could weaken confidence in elections. Similar provisions have been enacted in Florida and Georgia this year.And dark money raised for the review may be going to more than just paying the firms conducting it.The Arizona state representative Mark Finchem, a strong supporter of the review and the “Stop the Steal” movement, claimed that his 501(c)(4) Guardian Defense Fund is “paying money for additional security at the site” in an interview with Steve Bannon on America’s Voice News.Finchem is currently campaigning to be Arizona’s next secretary of state, and claimed he had talked to Trump about the 2020 election in an appearance on the Twitch stream of Redpill78, which the New York Times reported promotes QAnon conspiracy theories. His attorney previously represented Cyber Ninjas.“Ironically, after outlawing transparent philanthropic funding of election administration, used to assist all voters, regardless of party, during a global pandemic, the Arizona senate now relies upon secret funding for their ‘audit’,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that received funding from Zuckerberg and Chan last year.*Key individuals behind the dark money groups have also been using a network of Telegram channels to coordinate messaging and amplify each other’s content.One of the main Telegram channels boosting the groups is Arizona Red Roots. Using Telegram and other messaging platforms, review proponents have quietly coordinated efforts and distributed “AZ Ground Troops Updates” detailing strategies pushing for the ballot review.An April “AZ Ground Troops Update” document downloaded from Telegram lists a number of key players in the Arizona review, including Power of the Meme, a site dedicated to making memes to promote the Arizona review and “Demand a Forensic Kinematic Audit”.In messages throughout March and April, organizers in the channel pushed followers to pressure the Arizona legislature to hire Jovan Pulitzer, a treasure hunter best known for inventing a cat-shaped device that allowed people to scan barcodes in magazines to find the product online. PC World magazine ranked it as one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.Pulitzer has become a kind of folk hero among those who believe the election was stolen (he has his own song) and Telegram messages in the channel told users Pulitzer was the only person who could do a necessary audit.“If New Hampshire uses Jovan + other auditors, why not AZ? Jovan, since Nov 2020, was the first and only one to propose auditing paper ballots in an ingenious and novel way – never proposed & never before done! And it is what we need for the best chance to find ballots pre-printed from China. Or ballots filled out by the same fraudulent person,” reads one message.The effort appears to have been successful. Pulitzer’s technology is reportedly being used by those running the Arizona review to inspect the quality of ballot paper and search for watermarks – a process election officials have said is unlikely to detect fraud. Officials are also reportedly using the technology to look for bamboo fibers in ballots, an echo of a conspiracy theory Pulitzer has endorsed suggesting ballots were flown into Arizona from Asia.Even some people involved in advising the review are skeptical of Pulitzer’s involvement.“This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an activist who is helping with the Arizona process, told the Guardian in May. “He’s a fraudster.”*Even as experts have warned of the dangers of the Arizona review, it has fast emerged as a model for similar efforts elsewhere. Trump on Friday called for the Pennsylvania senate to authorize a similar effort, just days after Mastriano and other lawmakers visited the Arizona count. Activists in New Hampshire unsuccessfully tried to get Pulitzer involved in a review of a local election there. And there are bubbling efforts in Michigan to conduct a “forensic audit” – language that mirrors what is being used to describe the Arizona effort.Some of the firms and individuals conducting the review also stand to potentially benefit from a proliferation of similar efforts across the country.A recently dismissed Michigan case that was promoted and fundraised for in the Arizona Telegram channels featured Cyber Ninja’s Logan as an expert witness. Another expert witness in the case was Benjamin Cotton, the founder of CyFIR, a digital forensics firm that is helping conduct the Arizona audit.The plaintiff’s attorney, Matthew DePerno, raised around $300,000 for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund” to support the failed case in Michigan.And while the amount of money raised through online fundraising platforms is publicly available, the total amount of money changing hands between each of the individuals and organizations involved in the efforts is subject to few disclosure requirements.Fontes, the Arizona Democrat, said it was “wholly inappropriate” for the Arizona state senate not to disclose who was funding the effort.“They have permitted this to happen, it happens under the authority of the Arizona state senate, this is senate president Karen Fann’s operation,” he said. “She can set whatever rules she wants to set. She has chosen secrecy. She has chosen to obfuscate. And she is trying to deflect responsibility for the lack of transparency.” More

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      Republicans are out to create the rigged voting system they claim to be victims of | Lawrence Douglas

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      “Our entire democracy is now at risk.” That was the note of alarm sounded last week by a group of prominent intellectuals on both the left and the right. The source of their concern are the Republican efforts, underway across the nation, to operationalize the “big lie”: the bogus claim that a vast conspiracy of fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.Consider the audit recently ordered by the Republican-controlled state senate in Arizona of the 2.1m votes cast in Maricopa county in the 2020 presidential contest. Lest the audit confirm what has already been proven ad nauseam – that the count was accurate and free of fraud – the senate chose an obscure company called Cyber Ninjas to conduct the recount. Based out of Florida, Cyber Ninjas has no record of ever having conducted an election audit and neglected to even submit a bid for the Arizona job. But the tiny firm did have one thing going for it: its CEO, Doug Logan, a self-proclaimed “follower of Jesus Christ” and proud father of 11, was on record attacking the 2020 election as riddled with fraud.Inspired by the Arizona case, Republicans in Georgia have demanded that their state undertake a similar “forensic” audit of the 2020 presidential count. And last Wednesday, a group of Republican state lawmakers from Pennsylvania paid a visit to the Arizona audit site, demanding that their home state conduct a like review.The aim of these efforts is not to overturn the result of the 2020 election, despite Donald Trump’s fantasies to the contrary. Evidently the former president anticipates his reinstatement in the White House roughly two months from now, and his coming rallies will no doubt give him the opportunity to grandly cast himself as a latter-day Napoleon returning triumphantly to power from his palmy exile. But the audits are not designed to stamp Trump a ticket back to DC – at least not at present. The goal is not to oust Biden now, but to conspire against his reelection in 2024.Suppressing the Black vote has been a staple of Republican politics for decadesIn this, the audits are of a piece with larger Republican campaigns to disenfranchise huge numbers of voters – specifically Black voters. The very Arizona Republicans who retained Cyber Ninjas recently passed a law that dramatically restricts the distribution of mail-in ballots. Republicans in Georgia have passed a sweeping law that limits the use of drop boxes and criminalizes the simple act of offering water to citizens stuck on long voting queues. And Texas Republicans are on the cusp of passing the most restrictive law of all: one that would restrict absentee ballots and ban drive-through voting altogether. Dozens of other states with Republican-controlled legislatures are racing to pass similar measures.True, suppressing the Black vote has been a staple of Republican politics for decades. But what distinguishes these new laws is both their sweep and the cynicism of their justification. For it is one thing to use the specter of possible fraud to justify such measures; another, to operationalize a lie about history to justify restrictions in the name of electoral integrity.Indeed, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these new laws is that they lower the bar for partisans to challenge and alter election results. In Georgia, for example, the new law prohibits the secretary of state from certifying results, a move designed to target Brad Raffensperger, the intrepid Republican who refused Trump’s demand that the secretary “find” enough votes to overcome Biden’s victory in the Peach State. And in Texas, partisans would no longer need to show that improper votes had materially affected the outcome of an election in order to seek to reverse the results.In the words of the bipartisan group, thanks to these changes, “several states … no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections”. Here I might add –that is precisely what the Republicans want. Fair elections entail uncertainty, and Republican lawmakers want to have none of it. They no longer trust the democratic process, not because they genuinely believe it corrupt, but because they legitimately fear that they cannot fairly win. And so, in good Orwellian fashion, they labor to create the very rigged system they falsely claim to be the victims of. Should their efforts to systematically restrict the voting opportunities of millions of citizens fail to secure them the White House in 2024, they will have in place the mechanisms Trump invoked but could not fully control in 2020. If Republicans have their way, come 2024, Trump or his rough successor will not have the likes of a Brad Raffensperger standing in their way.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2o2o and is also a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US. He teaches at Amherst College More

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      in Elections

      Arizona 2020 Election Review: Risks for Republicans and Democracy

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      Experts call it a circus. Polls say it will hurt the G.O.P. in 2022. But Republicans are on board in Arizona and elsewhere, despite warnings of lasting damage to the political system.SURPRISE, Ariz. — Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line.“There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded purchases into his vehicle outside a Home Depot. “I don’t think there was any fraud. My opinion of this is that it’s a big lie.”Mr. Goins is flesh-and-blood evidence of what political analysts here are all but shouting: The Republican State Senate’s autopsy of the 2020 vote, broadly seen as a shambolic, partisan effort to nurse grievances about Donald J. Trump’s loss here in November, risks driving away some of the very people the party needs to win statewide elections in 2022.That Arizona Republicans are ignoring that message — and that Republicans in other states are now trying to mount their own Arizona-style audits — raises worrisome questions not just about their strategy, but about its impact on an American democracy facing fundamental threats.Now in its seventh week, the review of 2.1 million votes in Arizona’s most populous county has ballooned not just into a national political spectacle, but also a political wind sock for the Republican Party — an early test of how its renewed subservience to Mr. Trump would play with voters.The returns to date are not encouraging for the party. A late-May poll of 400 Arizonans by the respected consulting firm HighGround Inc. found that more than 55 percent of respondents opposed the vote review, most of them strongly. Fewer than 41 percent approved of it. By about 45 to 33 percent, respondents said they were less likely — much less, most said — to vote for a Republican candidate who supported the review.Workers recounting 2020 general election ballots in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe review itself, troubled by procedural blunders and defections, has largely sacrificed any claim to impartiality. The Pennsylvania computer forensics firm that was conducting the hand recount of ballots quit without a clear explanation this month, adding further chaos to a count that election authorities and other critics say has been making up its rules as it went along.“If they were voting on it again today, they would have withheld doing this, because it’s been nothing but a headache,” Jim Kolbe, a Republican congressman from southeast Arizona from 1985 to 2003, said of the Republican state senators who are backing the review. “It’s a black mark on Arizona’s reputation.”Instead, the Republicans in the Arizona Senate have doubled down. And as the review’s notoriety has grown, pro-Trump Republicans in other states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have begun to promote their own plans to investigate the November vote, even though — as in Arizona — elections in those states have been certified as accurate and free from any fraud that could have affected the outcome.The sudden interest in exhuming the November election is explained by another number from the poll in Arizona: While only about 41 percent of all 400 respondents said they supported the Maricopa audit, almost 77 percent of Republican respondents did.Among the Trump supporters who dominate the Republican Party, skepticism about the election results, fueled almost entirely by Mr. Trump’s lies, remains unshaken, and catering to it is politically profitable. Leslie S. Minkus, 77, is a business consultant in Chandler, another Republican stronghold just southeast of Phoenix. His wife, Phyllis, serves on the local Republican legislative district committee. “The majority of voters here in Arizona know that this election was stolen,” he said in an interview. “It’s pretty obvious that our alleged president is not more popular than previous presidents, and still wound up getting a majority of the vote.”Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Goodyear, Ariz., last year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOpposition to the review by Democrats and some Republicans — including the Republican-run county board of supervisors and the Republican who is the chief county election officer — only shows that they have something to hide, Mr. Minkus added. And as for previous checks of ballots and voting equipment that showed no sign of fraud, he said, “I don’t think anybody would agree that the audits done in the past were independent.”In conversations with a range of Phoenix-area residents, many who supported the review were more equivocal than Mr. Minkus. “I think there was fraud going on. I mean, every election, there’s fraud,” said Eric M. Fauls, a 56-year-old California expatriate who moved to a golfing community in Surprise three years ago. “California — it was really bad — but I mean, California is never going to go Republican. With a swing state, it’s really important, so I think it’s worth doing an audit.”Still, he said, “I don’t know if there’s enough evidence either way to make it legitimate.”Most of the review’s critics, on the other hand, left little doubt of their feelings. “It’s a threat to our democracy. I think there’s no doubt about that,” said Dan Harlan, a defense-industry employee who changed his lifelong Republican registration to Democrat last year so he could help pick Mr. Trump’s opponent. “This audit is being conducted because the Republican Party refuses to look at long-term demographics and realize they can no longer be the party of the white male. And they’re doing everything they can to maintain power.“It’s not about democracy; it’s about winning,” he said. “And when any organization becomes more concerned with maintaining itself, losing its core values is no longer important.”Jane Davis, an 89-year-old retired nurse, was a Republican for 40 years before she re-registered as an independent and voted last year for Mr. Biden. The State Senate Republicans have backed an audit, she said, “to cause problems.”“I think it’s ridiculous, and I object to their spending any taxpayer money” on the review, she said.Protesters last month outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where ballots from the 2020 general election were being recounted. Courtney Pedroza/Getty ImagesChuck Coughlin, the Phoenix pollster who conducted the Arizona survey, said people like the Minkuses were in firm control of the state Republican Party in no small part because they are the ones who vote. Four in five Republican primary-election voters, he said, are 50 or older.By itself, that white-hot core is not large enough to wield power in statewide elections, Mr. Coughlin said. But it is plenty large enough to advance Mr. Trump’s narrative of a corrupt elite that is stealing power from the nation’s true patriots, particularly when it is stoked by politicians.“Historically on these big issues, you have a lively public discussion and then it goes away; the issue moves on to something else,” he said. “But this is an issue that we’re dwelling on because it’s to Trump’s advantage that the party continues to dwell on it — on his loss, and his victimhood and his identity.“I feel legitimately bad for these people that they’re so wounded that they are willing to take their party and a heretofore vibrant democracy down with it.”Indeed, some elections experts say that’s why the politics of the “audit,” as extravagantly flawed as it is, may be more complex than meets the eye. If it is about winning elections and building a majority, it looks like a political loser. If it’s about permanent grievance and undermining faith in the democratic system for political gain, maybe not.Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate president, and other Republicans have insisted that their election review is not intended to contest Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but to address voters’ concerns that the election had been stolen. In practice, those experts say, the review keeps the stolen-election narrative front and center in the state’s politics, slowly eroding faith in representative government.Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate last year. She said the purpose of the review was to address concerns of Trump voters that the election had been stolen. Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press“The problem is that Americans have a real lack of trust in institutions these days,” said William Mishler, a longtime expert on democratic institutions at the University of Arizona. And even many who regard the Arizona election review as a discredited, amateur exercise “fear the mischief that’s likely to come out of this in the form of some further undermining of confidence in the election outcome.”Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime student of the American political system, said the Arizona election review highlighted a seismic shift in the rules of American democracy. In years past, political parties were forces for moderation, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible. Now, he said, one of the two major parties was taking precisely the opposite tack.“We’ve had crazies in public life before,” he said. “We’ve had demagogues speaking out and sometimes winning high office. The difference this time is that they’re being encouraged rather than constrained by party and election officials.” Without some check on radicalism, he said, “our whole system breaks down.”Mr. Mishler concurred. “What worries me is not that there’s a minority of crazies in the party,” he said of the Republicans. “It’s that there’s a majority of the crazies.”That said, election inquiries only count votes. Mr. Mishler, Mr. Mann and Mr. Kolbe, the former representative, all said that a more imminent threat to democracy was what they called an effort by some Republicans to disregard votes entirely. They cited changes in state laws that could make challenging or nullifying election results easier, and a burst of candidacies by stolen-election advocates for crucial election posts such as secretary of state offices.Arizona is among the latter. The race to replace Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who s week that she was running for governor, already has attracted one Republican legislator who is an election conspiracy theorist and another who is perhaps the legislature’s leading supporter of restrictions on the right to vote.“These are perilous times,” Mr. Mann said. “Arizona is just demonstrating it.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      Arizona emails show Trump pushed ‘to prove any fraud’ before Capitol attack

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      As Donald Trump digested news of a diminished online presence this week—a two-year suspension from Facebook for inciting the Capitol attack, and confirmation that his blog shuttered due to a “staggeringly small audience”—North Carolina’s Republican convention on Saturday night was poised to potentially strengthen an anaemic political operation.In the wake of his loss to Joe Biden, Trump’s political operation shrunk “to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016,” The New York Times reported. Most of these figures, The Times pointed out, “go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.”Meanwhile, Trump’s brash businessman persona seemed to have waned. While he travels to Manhattan from his New Jersey golf club to work out of Trump Tower “at least once a week,” his commute draws scant attention. In his Trump Tower office, he is “mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.” He no longer has the company of longtime cronies and staffers, nor his children, per this Times report. It’s unclear what Trump will say at this conference, which The Times described as being “billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches.” But Trump’s presence could show just how much sway he holds over the Republican party. It could also test the extent to which his day-to-day supporters remain loyal to him. Facebook announced on Friday that the company would suspend Trump for two years. This announcement follows the recommendation of Facebook’s oversight board. Trump was suspended from the social media site in January, for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol building, in service of his lie that Joe Biden won because of electoral fraud. “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, remarked in a statement on Friday.Suspension from Facebook would likely pose a devastating sucker-punch to most politicians’ aspirations—it’s a platform where beneficial disinformation can proliferate, not to mention an opportunity for direct access to voters. But Trump’s response to this ban might have teased his political future—namely, dropping a strong hint that he’d run for president again in 2024. “Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!” remarked Trump’s statement responding to this suspension. These comments came amid reports this week that Trump believes he will be reinstated to the White House by August. Trump did not say in his Facebook statement Friday whether he thought he’d resume his role due to reinstatement, or due to a successful presidential run in 2024. Regardless of these will he-or-won’t he vagaries, recent metrics showed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party was strong. “Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far,” The Times noted.The extent to which Trump might attempt a comeback was further underscored by revelations about how much he tried to influence results in Arizona’s election. Emails were released this week in which the Republican president of the Arizona state senate said Trump called her after his election defeat last year, to thank her “for pushing to prove any fraud”.The emails add to understanding of the evolution of Trump’s “big lie”, that his defeat by Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud, and how it fuelled the deadly Capitol assault. The Arizona emails were obtained by American Oversight, a legal watchdog, via a Freedom of Information request. They showed how Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pushed officials to act and how a controversial election audit in Arizona’s most populous county came to be set up.Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are prominent among states which produced Biden victories Trump and his supporters insist won by fraud. They were not.The release of the Arizona emails showed how Trump pursued his claim of fraud after the election was called.Election day was 3 November. Biden was declared the winner four days later. The Democrat won by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college. That was the score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result Trump called a landslide.Regardless, Trump went on the offensive with a frantic legal effort to prove fraud, led by Giuliani and almost entirely laughed out of court.In one Arizona email released on Friday, dated 2 December, Karen Fann, the Republican state senate president, told two constituents she had spoken to Giuliani “at least six times over the past two weeks”.Threatened later in the month with being recalled from office by “the new patriot movement of the United States”, Fann wrote that the state senate was “doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done”.Republicans in Maricopa county, the most populous county in Arizona, mounted a controversial audit of ballots. Most analysts view the audit as part of a concerted attempt by Republicans in state governments to restrict access to the ballot or produce laws by which results can be overturned.In the emails released by American Oversight, Fann told the constituent threatening action against her she had been “in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done”.She added: “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”Fann also told a constituent concerned about the use of taxpayers’ money: “Biden won. 45% of all Arizona voters think there is a problem with the election system. The audit is to disprove those theories or find ways to improve the system.”The emails also show the involvement of Christina Bobb. A reporter for One America News Network, a rightwing TV channel praised by Trump, Bobb has raised funds in support of the Maricopa audit.Another fringe rightwing network, Newsmax, has said it will show Trump’s return to public speaking on Saturday evening. More

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      Katie Hobbs, Arizona Secretary of State, Announces Bid for Governor

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      Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat who gained prominence for defending the state’s election system, has condemned a Republican recount currently underway, calling it a threat to democracy.Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, who gained national attention for her stalwart defense of the state’s electoral system in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, announced on Wednesday that she was running for governor, portraying herself as a pragmatic leader who does not back down in the face of criticism and threats.Ms. Hobbs has become a frequent fixture on cable news shows since the fall — first as Arizona’s vote count continued for several days after Election Day in November, and again this spring as Republicans conducted a widely criticized audit of ballots cast in Maricopa County. Ms. Hobbs has repeatedly condemned the partisan recount as a dangerous threat to democracy and has assigned observers to track problems with the process.“We did our job,” she said in a video announcing her bid. “They refused to do theirs. And there’s a lot more work to be done.”I’m running for Governor to deliver transparency, accountability, and results for Arizonans — just like I’ve done my whole career.Join me: https://t.co/LM2sCDVynA pic.twitter.com/5y3QtFvYAk— Katie Hobbs (@katiehobbs) June 2, 2021
      In some ways, the recount has elevated Ms. Hobbs, who some polls suggest is the most popular statewide elected official. She joined a lawsuit to try to stop the recount, which has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote. She issued a scathing six-page letter detailing problems with the audit and has recommended that Maricopa County replace its voting machines and vote tabulators because of the lack of physical security and transparency around the process. “We cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them,” she wrote.A campaign video announcing her run opens by referring to the attacks and death threats that she has faced in the wake of the election — including armed protesters showing up at her home.“When you’re under attack, some would have you believe you have two choices: fight or give in. But there is a third option: get the job done,” Ms. Hobbs says in the video announcement. “I’m here to solve problems.”In the days after last November’s election, as Arizona’s votes were being counted amid intense scrutiny and criticism from the Trump White House and its allies, Ms. Hobbs regularly appeared on television to provide updates on the counting process and defend the integrity of the state’s voting processes.Republicans in the State Legislature have struck back at Ms. Hobbs for her opposition to the recount. After Ms. Hobbs sued them, Republicans passed a measure to strip her of her ability to defend election lawsuits, instead giving that power to the attorney general, also a Republican.The bill, which has not yet been approved by the full Legislature, appears to specifically target Ms. Hobbs; it would expire in January of 2023, when her current term ends. Ms. Hobbs called the measure “an attack on Arizona voters.”The Arizona G.O.P. has largely doubled down on the baseless accusation that the election was “stolen” from former President Donald J. Trump, with the state party going as far as censuring elected officials, including the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, for not being sufficiently loyal by declining to back the attempt to subvert the election.But the efforts have largely turned off independent voters in the state, who make up roughly a third of the electorate there.“The other side isn’t offering policies to make our lives better, they’re offering conspiracy theories that only make our lives worse,” Ms. Hobbs said in her video.Mr. Ducey is not eligible to run in the 2022 election because of term limits and the field to replace him is likely to be crowded. Several Republicans have also declared their candidacy in recent days, including Kimberly Yee, who is currently the state treasurer, and Kari Lake, a former anchor for the local Fox television station. More

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      in US Politics

      Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterConservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process.Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.“It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Research.The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.“Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines,” Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. “It’s amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.”Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the state’s top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county – another hotbed of conspiracy theories – that boards didn’t have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.“We have every reason to want transparency,” Jocelyn Benson, the state’s top election official, said in an interview. “But that’s not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.”San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the county’s clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trump’s baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials’ custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Biden’s win over Trump last year.Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.“Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.“The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth – the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.” More

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      in US Politics

      Arizona ‘refurbishes’ its gas chamber to prepare for executions, documents reveal

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      The state of Arizona is preparing to kill death row inmates using hydrogen cyanide, the same lethal gas that was deployed at Auschwitz.Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530.It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.Over the past few months the Republican-controlled state has moved aggressively to restart its deeply flawed execution system. The death penalty has been in abeyance in Arizona for seven years following the gruesomely botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014.Last month, the Guardian revealed that Arizona spent a jaw-dropping $1.5m on a batch of pentobarbital in October, a sedative which it now hopes to use as its main lethal injection method.The Guardian’s documents, obtained through public records requests, show that officials have also gone to considerable lengths to revive the state’s mothballed gas chamber, housed at ASPC-Florence. A series of tests were conducted last August to appraise its “operability”.Seals on windows and the door were checked to ensure airtightness, and drains cleared of blockage. Water was used in the tests in place of the deadly chemicals, with a smoke grenade ignited to simulate the gas.Some of the techniques used to test the safety of the chamber were astonishingly primitive, the documents reveal. Prison officials checked for gas seepages with a candle.The flame of the candle was held up to the sealed windows and door and if its flame remained steady and did not flicker the chamber was deemed to be airtight. In December staff declared the vessel “operationally ready”.The preparation of cyanide gas executions presents Arizona death row inmates with a Hobson’s choice between two questionable ways to die. Should they opt for the gas chamber, they should be mindful of the last time anybody was gassed by the state.Walter LaGrand, a German national, was sentenced to death for a 1982 bungled armed bank robbery in which a man was killed. The Tucson Citizen published an eyewitness account of his 1999 execution in which he displayed “agonizing choking and gagging” and took 18 minutes to die.“The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Citizen reported. “He began coughing violently – three or four loud hacks – and made a gagging sound before falling forward.”The newspaper recorded that over many minutes the inmate’s head and arms twitched, and his hands were “red and clenched”.Should an inmate choose death by lethal injection – the method widely deployed among death penalty states as the supposedly scientific and humane alternative to gas, electric chair or firing squad – they will also find the last time it was used in Arizona it was anything but humane.Joseph Wood took almost two hours to die when Arizona experimented on him with 15 doses of a then little-used concoction of lethal injection drugs. An eye witness told the Guardian that he counted Wood gasp and gulp 660 times.In its current rush to restart executions, Arizona has selected two inmates as likely candidates to go first out of a current death row population of 115 people. They are Frank Atwood, 65, sentenced to death for killing an eight-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, in 1984; and Clarence Dixon, 65, convicted of the 1978 murder of a college student, Deana Bowdoin.A member of Atwood’s legal team, Joseph Perkovich of Phillips Black, told the Guardian that it was improper for the state to be hurrying towards setting an execution date when the pandemic had impeded investigation into his client’s possible innocence for more than a year. As for Atwood’s choice between lethal injection or gas, Perkovich said: “Neither option is tenable.”The attorney pointed out that there is a discrepancy between the potassium cyanide that has been obtained by the corrections department and the state’s execution protocol which stipulates that sodium cyanide must be used. “This is not a small detail – the specific compound is vitally important,” he said.Perkovich added that “Frank Atwood is prepared to die. He is a man of Greek Orthodox faith and is preparing for this moment. But he does not want to be tortured and subjected to a botched execution.”Inmates who choose the gas chamber are strapped into a chair in the centre of the vessel. Coloured levers are then used to drop the sodium cyanide into a pot of sulfuric acid under the chair, releasing the deadly hydrogen cyanide into the air.Once the prisoner is dead, the gas is neutralized with ammonia until the chamber is safe to enter. “As a precautionary method,” the death chamber protocol says, “it is recommended that the team removing the body wear gas masks and rubber gloves and that the hair of the deceased inmate be ruffled in order to allow any residually trapped gas to escape.”The documents record how prison staff engaged in role play during last year’s tests. Guards acted out as inmates who resisted going to their death, screaming: “This is murder”, “I’m innocent”, “You’re putting me down like an animal”, and “This is against everything America stands for”.Despite Arizona’s best efforts to present its gas chamber as a reputable institution, the horrors of the past hang heavily over it. The Nazis used hydrogen cyanide under the trade name Zyklon B to kill more than 1 million people in gas chambers in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said: “You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?” More

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      in Elections

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

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