Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Arizona Republicans deploy Cyber Ninjas in pro-Trump election audit

      by

      Months after Donald Trump’s election defeat, Republicans in Arizona are challenging the outcome with an unprecedented effort to audit results in their most populous county – all run by a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, with no elections experience.The state senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county and the machines that counted them, along with computer hard drives full of data. The materials were then handed to Cyber Ninjas, a consultancy run by a man who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming official election results are illegitimate.Elections professionals fear the process will severely undermine faith in democracy.“I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local officials which has not worked in Arizona.Conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory have had particular staying power in Arizona, which went Democratic for just the second time in 72 years. On Friday, Trump predicted the audit would reveal fraud and prompt similar reviews in other states he lost.“Thank you state senators and others in Arizona for commencing this full forensic audit,” he said in a statement. “I predict the results will be startling!”Cyber Ninjas began a manual recount on Friday, a day after Democrats asked a judge to put an end to the audit. The judge ordered the company to follow ballot and voter secrecy laws and demanded it turn over written procedures and training manuals before a hearing on Monday. He offered to pause the count over the weekend if Democrats posted a $1m bond to cover added expenses. The party declined.On a since-deleted Twitter account, Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan used hashtags and shared memes popular with people promoting unsupported allegations casting doubt on Biden’s victory. Logan says his personal views are irrelevant because he is running a transparent audit with video streamed online.“There’s a lot of Americans here, myself included, that are really bothered by the way our country is being ripped apart right now,” Logan said. “We want a transparent audit to be in place so that people can trust the results and can get everyone on the same page.”Logan refuses to disclose who is paying him or who is counting the ballots, and will not commit to using bipartisan teams for the process.The Republican-dominated Arizona senate refuses to let media observe the count. Reporters can accept a six-hour shift as an official observer but photography and note-taking are prohibited. It would be a violation of journalistic ethics for reporters to participate in an event they were covering.The state senate has put up $150,000 for the audit but Logan has acknowledged that is not enough to cover his expenses. A rightwing cable channel, One America News Network, raised money from unknown contributors which went directly to Cyber Ninjas. Logan would not commit to disclosing the donors and would not provide an estimate for the cost of his audit.Cyber Ninjas plans to have teams of three people manually count each ballot, looking only at the presidential and US Senate contests, which were won by Democrats.Logan said the counters were members of law enforcement and the military as well as retirees. He would not say how many were Democrats or Republicans and would not commit to ensuring the counting teams are bipartisan.The process was to be overseen by volunteers. As of a week ago, 70% were Republicans, according to Ken Bennett, a Republican former secretary of state serving as a liaison between the Senate and the auditors.Cyber Ninjas plans to review ballot-counting machines and data and to scan the composition of fibers in paper ballots in search of fakes. It plans to go door-to-door in select precincts to ask people if they voted. Logan was vague about how the precincts were chosen but said a statistical analysis was done “based on voter histories”.The audit has been beset by mistakes. Hand counters began the day using blue pens, which are banned in ballot counting rooms because they can be read by ballot machines. A crew from a group of Phoenix television stations, azfamily, had unfettered access to the supposedly secure facility as auditors were setting up equipment and receiving ballots and machines.Election experts said hand counts are prone to errors and questioned a lack of transparent procedures for adjudicating voter intent.Maricopa county conducted pre- and post-election reviews to check the accuracy of voting machines, including a hand count of a representative sample of ballots, as required by state law. The county hired two auditing firms that reported no malicious software or incorrect counting equipment.“We’re going to set up a new norm where we don’t accept the outcome of elections in a free and fair and just democracy, and that is the core of what is at stake here,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa county elections official.“I think that is incredibly, incredibly problematic.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      McCarthy dodges questions about what Trump said as Capitol riot raged

      by

      One of the few House Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment over the US Capitol attack said on Sunday his party was “in a perpetual state of denial” over the former president’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.At the same time, the Republican leader in the House refused to deny that during the deadly riot on 6 January, when he asked Trump to call off supporters the then president told to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, Trump said: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people were more upset about the election than you are.”Representative Peter Meijer spoke to CNN’s Inside Politics. The minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, appeared on Fox News Sunday. Both are part of a party which remains in the former president’s grip.In February a Republican congresswoman, Jaime Herrera Beutler, said McCarthy told her what Trump said on a call as the riot progressed.“When McCarthy finally reached the president on 6 January and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot,” she said, “the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa [leftwing activists] that had breached the Capitol.“McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”Her account contradicted Trump’s claim that he took immediate action to stop an attack that resulted in five deaths as the mob sought lawmakers including Vice-President Mike Pence to kidnap and possibly kill. More than 400 charges have been brought.News outlets have also reported that the call between McCarthy and Trump became heated, the minority leader asking: “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”McCarthy was initially critical of Trump’s behaviour but quickly backed down and supported the president when he was impeached for inciting an insurrection.Meijer and Herrera Beutler were among 10 Republicans who voted with Democrats to send Trump for trial in the Senate, the most bipartisan such vote in US history. Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to find him guilty.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked McCarthy if Herrera Beutler’s account of his conversation with Trump was accurate.“I was the first person to contact [Trump] when the riot was going on,” McCarthy said. “He didn’t see it. What he ended the call [he] was saying, telling me he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did, he put a video out later.”Wallace replied that Trump’s appeal to supporters to stop the violence came “quite a lot later. And it was a pretty weak video. But I’m asking you specifically, did he say to you, ‘I guess some people are more concerned about the election than you are’?”“[In] my conversation with the president,” McCarthy said, “I engaged in the idea of making sure we could stop what was going on inside the Capitol. At that moment in time the president said he would help.”McCarthy was also asked if Trump “ever reached out to you since that report came out to discuss what you talked about in the 6 January phone call, and did you say to him, ‘I can’t because we’re under oath’?”“No, that never happened,” McCarthy said. “Never even close.”“And if it did happen,” Wallace said, “you would agree that would be witness tampering?”“Yeah,” said McCarthy, “but never happened, never even came close, never had any conversation like that. Never heard that rumour before till today.”McCarthy’s denials found an echo – or a reflection – in Meijer’s remarks to CNN.Like others who voted for impeachment, the Michigan representative has attracted a pro-Trump challenger. On Sunday he said the former president’s lies were “being pursued at the exclusion of actually being able to win more elections”.“Now one of the biggest challenges,” he said, “is if you don’t believe that you lost, if you think that the 2020 election was stolen, and then you drag that out and say, ‘Well, of course then the Georgia Senate elections must be stolen too,’ you just live in a perpetual state of denial. And I know there are plenty who don’t deny it, but it’s a conundrum.”On Fox News Sunday, McCarthy also refused to commit to supporting a congressional investigation of the Capitol attack, despite concessions from Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, in an attempt to get Republicans on board.Insisting any investigation should look into “political violence across this country”, McCarthy claimed the issue was “too important to negotiate in the press”. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      George W Bush reveals he voted for Condoleezza Rice in 2020 US election

      by

      Former president George W Bush revealed in an interview with People magazine that he didn’t vote for either the Republican incumbent Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. Instead, he wrote in Condoleezza Rice.Rice, who served as secretary of state for Bush from 2005 to 2009, was aware of the write-in. But, “She told me she would refuse to accept the office,” Bush shared.This revelation comes amid a promotional book tour for Bush’s new compilation of oil paintings depicting American immigrants and their stories.It’s all in an effort, Bush says, to soften hearts for compassionate immigration reforms after several years of harsh and “frightening” anti-immigrant rhetoric, mostly from his own Republican party.Earlier this week, Bush criticized the GOP, calling current actors in the party “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Bush told People that he “painted with too broad a brush” and excluded “a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem”.But the former president is not without his own history of faults, and his journey to rehabilitation after a devastating presidency built upon the “war on terror” isn’t as well received by many as one would think.Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Caitlyn Jenner announces plan to run for governor of California

      by

      Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and reality television star, has announced she will be challenging California governor Gavin Newsom in the impending gubernatorial recall election.In a post on her website, Jenner, a longtime Republican who had signaled earlier this month that she was considering a run, proclaimed, “I’m in!”The recall effort against Newsom, a Democrat, was spearheaded by Republicans in California who opposed the governor’s Covid-era business shutdowns, as well as his immigration and tax policies. It gained support in the winter while California was in the throes of its most deadly phase of the pandemic. Officials have until the end of April to verify recall petition signatures, and the earliest an election would be held is sometime in November.Still, with recall proponents saying they have collected more than the 1.5m signatures needed to force an election, the prospect of a recall look all but inevitable.Jenner, a transgender activist of Keeping Up With the Kardashians fame, would be the most prominent celebrity to enter the race, which has already attracted a range of both traditional politicians and eccentric figures.The former group includes John Cox, a businessman who lost to Newsom by 24 points during the last gubernatorial election (the largest margin in a California governor’s race since the 1950s), Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego and Doug Ose, a former US representative.Porn actor and reality TV star Mary Carey and model Angelyne, who rose to prominence in the 1980s after she was featured in a series of iconic billboards around LA, are also running.All these challengers will face a steep uphill battle. Although Newsom saw his approval ratings dip during the state’s most arduous phase of the pandemic, most California voters still support him. Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California found that 56% of likely voters oppose recalling the governor, and 5% are unsure. Only 40% would vote to remove the governor from office.The recall campaign’s links with far-right groups, including Q-Anon, could also sink its chances of succeeding. Although recall proponents say they have broad support and have sought to distance themselves from far-right supporters following the 6 January attack on the US Capitol led by right-wing extremists, their anti-masking and anti-immigrant rhetoric has narrow appeal in California.Jenner had reportedly consulted with several advisers who worked with Donald Trump, who remains overwhelmingly unpopular in California. After initially supporting Trump‘s presidential run, she changed her views over his administration’s attacks on transgender rights. Still, her limited experience and associations with the former president, limit her chances in the state.“Caitlyn Jenner’s run feels like, at best a publicity stunt, at worst a way to raise funds from republican supporters,” said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute for Government Reform who studies recall elections. “The biggest issue for Newsom is actually a Democratic candidate running.”Democrats in California and Washington DC, however, have made clear – at least for now – that the party will stand behind Newsom.In the heavily left-leaning state, where Democrats control the governor’s office and the legislature, Republicans have increasingly become a minority party. Jenner, in explaining her reasoning for running, said, “For the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people.” She added that she saw herself as a “disruptor” of Democratic hegemony, announcing on her website that she had filed the initial paperwork to run. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Fight to vote: Arizona county’s ‘ludicrous’ election audit

      by

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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

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