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      The Trump Clown Car Has a Smashup in Arizona

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      Monday was supposed to be a banner day for former President Donald Trump and the MAGAverse. After multiple delays, legal challenges and public controversies, the results of the third — and hopefully final — review of the presidential voting in Maricopa County, Ariz., was scheduled for delivery to its Republican sponsors in the State Senate. At long last, the proof of mass election fraud would be laid out for all to see! Mr. Trump would be vindicated! Maybe even reinstated!At least, that’s what MAGA die-hards hunkered down in their bunkers of disinformation were hoping. Most everyone else — including plenty of Arizona officials from both parties — just wanted this gong show to end.Alas, it was not to be. On Monday, the Republican president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, announced that the Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm overseeing the recount, had not yet completed a full draft report after all. It seems the firm’s chief executive and two other members of the “audit team” had come down with Covid-19. Also, the State Senate had only just received images of the ballot envelopes from Maricopa County, which still needed to be analyzed for inclusion in the final report.And so the spectacle grinds on.The clown-car chaos in Arizona is a near-perfect distillation of what Mr. Trump has done to the Republican Party, as well as much of the broader public. On what feels like a daily basis, he beats the drum about a stolen election, setting a tuneful lie that many Republican voters still dance to as the party mandarins look on, in either active support or silence. The political ramifications of this disinformation will be on display in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race next year, as well as those elsewhere, as independents and moderates assess if this is the party they want to reward.But there’s another cost that should worry all of us: the integrity of election audits, which are important and are necessary. While many secretaries of state are now pushing for new standards for such audits, the Arizona recount stands as an object lesson about the embarrassing damage to democracy that one party can inflict when led by a sore loser who still manages to scare people.For those who have blissfully forgotten the Arizona back story: Mr. Trump was mad about narrowly losing the state to Joe Biden. He was madder still when two recounts of vote-rich Maricopa County confirmed his loser status. Desperate to appease him and his devoted base, a gaggle of Republican state senators arranged for yet another review, this one run according to their preferences and overseen by private contractors of their choosing. The result has been a poisonous, partisan P.R. stunt so poorly executed that it makes the hunt for a new “Jeopardy!” host look smooth by comparison.From the jump, it was clear that Arizona’s Republican lawmakers weren’t interested in putting together a serious audit. Ms. Fann tapped the Cyber Ninjas to run the show, despite the firm’s total lack of auditing experience — and despite it not submitting a formal proposal. How did this happen? It may have helped that the firm’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had tweeted his support of some of the wackier election-fraud conspiracy theories. (Venezuela? Really?)The Republican lawmakers arranged for state taxpayers to foot part of the bill — an outrage in itself. But the Cyber Ninjas also gathered millions in private funding from Trump supporters. These include the former chief executive of Overstock.com, himself another spreader of election-fraud manure; a nonprofit group led by the former Trump administration official and QAnon flirt Michael Flynn; and a nonprofit founded by a host on the MAGA-tastic One America News Network.As for the ballot counting process, the word “squirrelly” doesn’t begin to cover it. Among other absurdities, the ballots were examined for secret watermarks and for bamboo fibers, a nod to the conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been shipped over from Asia. And forget careful screening of workers for political bias. Among those hired was the former state lawmaker Anthony Kern, a “stop the steal” crusader who was photographed on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot. (After a reporter posted a picture on Twitter of Mr. Kern at a counting table, the ex-lawmaker was removed over concerns about “optics.”)In an independent evaluation of the process, Barry Burden, the head of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, detailed the review’s many “maladies.” “They include processing errors caused by a lack of basic knowledge, partisan biases of the people conducting the audit, and inconsistencies of procedures that undermine the reliability of the review and any conclusions they may draw. In particular, the operation lacks the consistency, attention to detail and transparency that are requirements for credible and reliable election reviews.”Even some Republican officials have had enough. In May, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a Republican-dominated body, accused state lawmakers of having “rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate” to “grifters.”Last week, the Maricopa County recorder, a Republican, issued a long prebuttal to the Ninjas’ expected report, lamenting that the process had been an unnecessary disaster, that its results could not be trusted and that it was time for his party to “move forward.”If only.Some of the costs of the recount are easier to calculate than others. Because of concerns that the security of its voting machines had been compromised during the review, Maricopa County decertified the equipment. Last week, county officials demanded that the State Senate shell out $2.8 million for the purchase of new machines. Ms. Fann promptly pooh-poohed the request, but if the Senate doesn’t officially respond within 60 days, the county can sue.However the Arizona odyssey ends, officials who care about restoring faith in the electoral system should take steps to prevent such nonsense from spreading. The Republicans’ recount was never going to change the outcome of the 2020 race. But it did become a model for Trump dead-enders across the nation — a beacon of obduracy.At its summer conference this month, the National Association of Secretaries of State overwhelmingly recommended establishing concrete guidelines for postelection audits. Among other measures, they advised states to adopt timelines for audits, to ensure that area election officials remain central to the process and to rely only on state or federally accredited test labs. Outside contractors, they urged, should be used sparingly and operate under intensive oversight.Having observed the slow-rolling Arizona debacle, states would be well served to install guard rails sooner rather than later. If there’s one thing the Trump years taught the nation, it’s that you cannot simply rely on public officials to operate in good faith or abide by widely accepted norms.Serious, well-run audits play an important role in safeguarding the integrity of elections. What Arizona’s Republican senators arranged, by contrast, is what you’d get if you crossed a clown pageant with a QAnon convention and made the whole thing open bar. The whole mess would be entertaining if it weren’t so destructive.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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      Trump Is Said to Have Called Arizona Official After Election Loss

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      Donald Trump tried to reach the top Republican in metropolitan Phoenix as his allies were trying to overturn the state’s 2020 results, according to the official, who said he did not pick up the calls.President Donald J. Trump twice sought to talk on the phone with the Republican leader of Arizona’s most populous county last winter as the Trump campaign and its allies tried unsuccessfully to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state’s presidential contest, according to the Republican official and records obtained by The Arizona Republic, a Phoenix newspaper.But the leader, Clint Hickman, then the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in an interview on Friday that he let the calls — made in late December and early January — go to voice mail and did not return them. “I told people, ‘Please don’t have the president call me,’” he said.At the time, Mr. Hickman was being pressed by the state Republican Party chairwoman and Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to investigate claims of fraud in the county’s election, which Mr. Biden had won by about 45,000 votes.Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that “it’s no surprise Maricopa County election officials had no desire to look into significant irregularities during the election,” though there is no evidence of widespread problems with Arizona’s election. She did not directly address the calls reportedly made by Mr. Trump. Two former campaign aides said they knew nothing about the outreach to the Maricopa County official.The Arizona Republic obtained the records of the phone calls from Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani after a Freedom of Information Act request.Mr. Hickman and the county’s four other supervisors certified the election results and have repeatedly called the vote free and fair. But the Republican-controlled State Senate began its own review of all 2.1 million votes cast in the county, which has been widely criticized by state officials from both parties and is still underway.The Arizona Republic reported that the calls came as the state Republican chairwoman, Kelli Ward, sought to connect Mr. Hickman and other county officials to Mr. Trump and his allies so they could discuss purported irregularities in the county’s election.Ms. Ward first told Mr. Hickman on Nov. 13, the day after the Maricopa vote count sealed Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona, that the president would probably call him. But the first call did not come until New Year’s Eve, when Mr. Hickman said the White House operator dialed him as he was dining with his wife.Mr. Hickman said the switchboard operator left a voice mail message saying Mr. Trump wished to speak with him and asking him to call back. He didn’t. Four nights later, the White House switchboard operator called Mr. Hickman again, he said. By then, Mr. Hickman recalled, he had read a transcript of Mr. Trump’s call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state whom Mr. Trump pressured to “find more votes” to reverse his defeat in the state. “I had seen what occurred in Georgia and I was like, ‘I want no part of this madness and the only way I enter into this is I call the president back,’” Mr. Hickman said.He sent the call to voice mail and did not return it because, he said, the county was in litigation over the election results at that point.In November and December, Mr. Giuliani also called Mr. Hickman and the three other Republicans on the Board of Supervisors, The Republic reported. That call to Mr. Hickman also went to his voice mail, he said, and he did not return it either.Among those he consulted with while considering whether to return Mr. Trump’s calls, Mr. Hickman said, was Thomas Liddy, the litigation chief of Maricopa County. Mr. Liddy is a son of G. Gordon Liddy, the key figure in the Watergate burglary.  “History collides,” Mr. Hickman said. “It’s a small world.”Annie Karni More

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

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

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

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

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      Arizona Senators Retract Claims of Deleted 2020 Presidential Election Files

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