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      Cyber Ninjas, UV lights and far-right funding: inside the strange Arizona 2020 election ‘audit’

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterOne of the first things you see when you step outside Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the ageing arena in Phoenix, is the Crazy Times Carnival, a temporary spectacle set up in the parking lot. In the evenings, just as the sun is setting, lights from the ferris wheel, the jingle of the carousel and shrieks of joy fill the massive desert sky.Inside the coliseum – nicknamed the Madhouse on McDowell – there is another carnival of sorts happening. The arena floor is where the Arizona senate, controlled by Republicans, is performing its own audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa county, home of Phoenix and most of the state’s registered voters. The effort, which comes after multiple audits affirming the results of the November election in the county in favor or Joe Biden, includes an examination of voting equipment, an authentication of ballot paper, and a hand recount of the nearly 2.1m ballots cast there. Republicans in the state legislature are simultaneously considering measures that would make it harder to vote in Arizona, which Biden carried by about 10,000 votes in November.The review – unprecedented in American politics – may also be one of the clearest manifestations to date of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud and the conspiracy theories that spread after the election (the former president and allies have loudly cheered on the Arizona effort). Far-right conspiracy theorists appear to be connected to the effort and the firm hired to lead the charge, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, has little experience in elections. The firm’s CEO has voiced support for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.Election experts are watching the unfolding effort with deep alarm, pointing out that officials are not using a reliable methodology – they hesitate to even label it an audit – and will produce a results that will give more fodder for conspiracy theorists. More troublingly, they worry the Arizona audit could be a model for Republicans to try elsewhere.“There’s not gonna be a valid result,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is the state’s top election official. “They’re writing the playbook here to do this around the country.” Indeed, Trump allies are already pushing for a similar effort in a small town in New Hampshire. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman in Georgia, has called for a similar audit in her state.Trump and allies have cheered on the effort. Outside the arena, Kelly Johnson, a 61-year-old from California, was among a small group of five people sitting in a tent who supported the effort. Johnson, who said he was at the Capitol on 6 January, when rioters stormed the building, claimed Trump didn’t fully have a chance to make his case in court after the election. Judges across the country, including several appointed by Trump, rejected several lawsuits to try and overturn the election results.A lot of people, he said, “are concerned … about whether or not the results are accurate because there has been no review, thorough review, accounting for results that anybody can have any confidence in”, he said.Last week, Hobbs, who has received death threats over her opposition, sent a letter to audit officials detailing problems with how it was being conducted. Many of the audit’s publicly-released procedures are vague, she wrote, laptops left unattended, and there weren’t guaranteed procedures in place to protect the chain of custody of ballots. The justice department sent its own letter to the Arizona senate expressing similar concerns as well as questioning a plan to knock on voters’ doors and to confirm their 2020 vote, which could lead to voter intimidation.Karen Fann, the Arizona senate president, replied on Friday, saying that auditors would “indefinitely defer” knocking on doors and that there were procedures in place to safeguard the ballots. She noted that the senate had hired Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state, to be “integrally involved in overseeing every facet of the audit”.But during several interviews with reporters last week, Bennett – a mild mannered and cheery 61-year-old – said he was unable to provide basic information about how the audit was running. He declined to say how many ballots the auditors were counting each day, instead pegging the overall estimate at about 200,000 counted ballots (as of Monday it had gone up to 275,000). After Anthony Kern, a Trump elector and former state lawmaker, appeared at a ballot counting table, Bennett said he was unsure how workers were being chosen (the Arizona Republic reported that far-right groups were involved in recruiting counters for the audit).And while audits usually ensure that representatives from both parties are present to inspect ballots, it’s unclear to what extent that’s happening, if at all, in Phoenix. Bennett said that 70% of observers – who do not count ballots – were Republicans and the remaining 30% were independents, libertarians and Democrats.While there were 46 tables set up to hold ballot counters in the arena last week, less than half of them were in use each day. Bennett told reporters repeatedly that the tables would soon be filled with additional workers who were undergoing background checks, but those workers have yet to materialize.Officials have also been opaque about what exactly they’re looking for in their analysis for ballot authenticity. In late April, auditors were seen scanning ballots with UV lights, arousing suspicion because of a QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump watermarked legitimate ballots after the election. Last week John Brakey, an activist assisting with the audit, said officials were looking for bamboo fibers in a nod to a baseless conspiracy theory that ballots were smuggled in from China. “I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?” Bennett quickly distanced himself from Brakey’s comments, saying: “I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying, ‘We’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic.’”Jeff Ellington, the president and CEO of Runbeck Election Services, which prints ballots for Maricopa county, said he couldn’t figure out what exactly auditors were looking for by examining the paper of the ballots.“What they’re doing is so cryptic,” he said. “It’s hard to know exactly what their game plan is on that.”Bennett and audit leaders have also declined repeatedly to comment on funding for the audit. The Arizona senate allocated just $150,000 to pay for the audit, far below the estimated cost. Trump-aligned figures, including attorney L Lin Wood and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, have reportedly already donated to the effort. Two anchors with the One America News network, a far-right outlet, have also been fundraising. Last Tuesday, Christina Bobb, a reporter for the network, recorded a segment from the press box that both reported on the audit and promoted the fundraising effort.Last week, the counting itself looked relatively simple, even boring. Workers were divided up into four teams. Tables with lazy susans in the middle were scattered across the arena floor. Three workers sat at each table with a tally sheet and counted votes in the presidential and US senate race as the ballots spun around the table. Once they finished counting a batch, the ballots go to a second table, where workers photographed each side, and then scanned the ballots under microscopic cameras. Observers dressed in bright orange shirts roamed the floor and watched for wrongdoing. A banner for Phoenix’s women’s basketball team hangs high above the floor that says: “The Madhouse is our house.”Despite the benign appearance, expert observers say there are glaring problems with the audit. Jennifer Morrell, a former election official designated a floor observer by the secretary of state’s office, noted that the ballots were spinning quickly around the table, giving counters little time to see the marks on the paper. In instances where there were discrepancies in the count, Morrell said she saw each table handle recounts slightly differently. She was also alarmed to see that once the ballots were tallied, there was no check to ensure that workers were entering aggregate totals into software.There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct“There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct,” she said. “One person, single point of failure, as a former election official, someone who does audits, it’s a huge red flag for me,” she said.The audit has been livestreamed online since it began in late April, but in-person public access is limited to just a handful of pool reporters who rotate in five-hour shifts and watch the effort from the arena’s press box, a dust-covered section about 20 rows up in the stands. It was close enough to see the counting on the floor, but not enough to see any details (some reporters brought binoculars to try and get a better view). Armed members of Arizona Rangers, a volunteer auxiliary law enforcement group, were stationed in the box and members accompanied reporters to the bathroom.It’s not clear what exactly the endgame of the audit is. Hobbs said she expected the officials to issue a report based on procedures that would be difficult to replicate because the process was so opaque. And Bennett acknowledged last week there was likely to be some discrepancy between the auditors’ total and the official total.“I don’t think anyone’s expecting that you’re going to count 2.1m somethings twice, using different methods, and you’re going to come up with exactly the same number,” he said. “The only unacceptable error rate is when it’s enough to make a difference in a particular race. And I’m not expecting there to be a difference of that magnitude.”Even though the audit won’t change the outcome of the 2020 race, it could still do damage by falsely making it appear that there was something amiss with election machinery.“They are taking advantage of the lack of information that the public has regarding the complexities of our system. And they’re creating a false narrative, and they’re setting themselves up to sell that false narrative,” said Fontes, who lost his re-election bid in November.That dynamic is already on display. Arizona Republicans last week accused Maricopa county of wrongly not turning over internet routers as well as administrative passwords for voting tabulators. County officials have resisted, saying that only Dominion, the election equipment vendor, has the passwords, which aren’t necessary to conduct an audit. Providing the routers, they said, would also jeopardize county security and personal information. The Maricopa county sheriff ,Paul Penzone, a Democrat, called the request for the routers “mind-numbingly reckless”. Conservative outlets have misleadlingly pointed to that denial as evidence of potential unusual activity.This may be the ultimate point of the audit – not to bring any finality to the 2020 election, but simply to provide more rabbit holes to go down to question it.Fontes, the former Maricopa county election official, doubted that the audit would change the mind of anyone who doubted the results of the election.“It can’t convince the conspiracy theorists. The only thing that will convince the conspiracy theorists of anything is a Trump victory,” he said. “That’s the only thing that they will accept. And if that’s the case, then this doesn’t matter. They don’t care about the truth.” More

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      Trump asserts power over Republicans as Liz Cheney faces ousting

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      Donald Trump is poised to tighten his grip on the Republican party with the ousting of one of his most prominent critics in Congress.Liz Cheney, the only woman in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, is widely expected to be voted out next week by members loyal to Trump.Cheney is a diehard conservative and daughter of George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney. Her removal for refusing to parrot Trump’s “big lie” that last year’s election was stolen would exemplify how the Republican party remains beholden to the disgraced ex-president.“The whole @RepLizCheney saga has been so clarifying,” David Axelrod, former chief strategist for Barack Obama, tweeted on Thursday. “She’s as conservative as they come. Her only sin was to call BS on Trump’s election fraud. For that, she will be expelled as a @GOP leader. The party is branding itself.”Multiple courts, as well as state and federal election officials, have rejected Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. But Republican-controlled state legislatures are using his allegations to justify legislation imposing new restrictions on voting.And far from backing down, Trump has issued several public statements in three days reiterating his baseless claims that Joe Biden’s 7m vote margin of victory was the result of fraud while attacking Republicans who refuse to buy into this narrative.He also joined Republican House leaders in backing Elise Stefanik, a pro-Trump congresswoman, for Cheney’s job as chair of the party’s conference. A vote could come as early as next Wednesday.Stefanik, 36, whose status in the party rose after she aggressively defended Trump during congressional hearings ahead of his 2019 impeachment, reportedly spoke to the former president by phone on Wednesday.Trump said in a statement: “Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership … Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair.”Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, appears to have calculated that embracing Trump offers the party’s best chance of winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections. McCarthy was caught by a “hot mic” on Fox News saying of Cheney: “I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence.”A statement from the office of Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican, made it explicit: “House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair.”Congressman Jim Jordan, an outspoken Trump loyalist, insisted that “the votes are there” to oust Cheney. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair reciting Democrat talking points,” he told Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90% of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74m Americans voted for.”During Trump’s presidency, Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. They are now looking to claw back narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections next year.But Cheney, the No 3 Republican in the House, is not going down without a fight. In an opinion column in the Washington Post on Wednesday, she urged her colleagues to reject the “dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality” in order to save the party, warning: “History is watching”.Cheney wrote: “Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work – confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.“The Republican party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the constitution.”Cheney, 54, held off an initial challenge to her leadership position earlier this year after she was among just 10 House Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol on 6 January. But she has few public supporters this time, dashing hopes that the former president might finally be losing sway.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Most of the Republicans were just too cowardly to speak what Liz Cheney has been saying publicly, which is why she survived the vote of no confidence the first time. She’s not going to survive it this time because it’s been clear that Donald Trump still has that hold on the party and they need him to raise money.”Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district, began her House career in 2015 as a moderate who spoke out against Trump’s ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.Setmayer added: “Elise Stefanik was an up-and-comer, a moderate who a lot of people saw potential to be a leader in the party. She was young, she was smart and she made a calculated decision to hop on the Trump train to bolster her political fortunes and if that’s not an example of selling your soul for political expediency, I don’t know what is.”Biden, meanwhile. said a “mini-revolution” over identity appeared to be under way in the Republican party. “Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he told reporters at the White House. More

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      Arizona Republicans hunt for bamboo-laced China ballots in 2020 ‘audit’ effort

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      Arizona Republicans are examining whether there is bamboo fiber in ballots that were used in the 2020 election, an activist assisting with the ongoing audit of the ballots told reporters this week. The latest claim underscores how rightwing conspiracy theories continue to fuel doubt about the results of the results.“There’s accusation that 40,000 ballots were flown in to Arizona and it was stuffed into the box and it came from the south-east part of the world, Asia, and what they’re doing is to find out whether there’s bamboo in the paper,” John Brakey, a longtime election audit advocate, told reporters.John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021
      Brakey told reporters he didn’t personally believe auditors would find bamboo fibers.“I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said on Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?”The search for bamboo fibers illustrates how the latest GOP audit of all 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, home to a majority of Arizona voters, is elevating absurd claims about the 2020 election. After election day, rightwing activists falsely claimed that China had imported ballots to tip the election for Biden and that those ballots could be identified because there was bamboo in the paper. Earlier, workers were using UV lights to examine ballots; while the purpose of doing so was never clear, there was a conspiracy theory after the election that Trump had watermarked ballots (the UV examinations have stopped).There are about a dozen tables on the audit floor at Veterans Memorial Coliseum where auditors are taking pictures of ballots and then running them under microscopic cameras that are supposed to provide high-quality images of the ballots. Those images are supposed to help auditors verify the authenticity of the ballots by allowing them to examine fibers, as well as folds in the paper and ink marks on ballots.Experts have expressed concern about whether this method is a reliable way of identifying fraud.Ken Bennett, the liaison between the auditors and the Arizona senate, said in an interview he wasn’t sure if auditors were looking for bamboo fibers specifically.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletter“I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying ‘we’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic,’” he told the Guardian. “They’re looking for folds in the paper. They’re looking for where the ovals are marked, is there a little bit of an indentation or was the mark made by a Xerox machine? It’s just kind of a general expression for ‘we’re checking the paper and the folds and everything to make sure that these are authentic ballots.’”The comment came amid increasing scrutiny of the audit, which many experts say is not credible and will only further undermine confidence in the 2020 race. The justice department sent a letter to the Arizona senate president, Karen Fann, on Wednesday expressing concern that the audit may be running afoul of federal laws regarding ballot custody and voter intimidation (during a separate part of the audit, workers will reportedly knock on voters’ door to confirm their 2020 vote).Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s top election official, sent a letter to Bennett on Wednesday expressing concern over how the audit is being run. She claimed that auditors did not have a clear process for tallying ballots, left laptops unattended, and clear procedures were not in place to hire unbiased counters. “Either do it right, or don’t do it at all,” she wrote.One of the people who spread the lie about China dumping ballots, according to Slate, was Javon Pulitzer, a treasure hunter and inventor, who is reportedly assisting with the Maricopa county audit. Though it’s not clear in what capacity Pulitzer is assisting, Brakey told reporters on Tuesday that the machines capturing the microscopic images of the ballots were linked to Pulitzer. “This guy is nuts,” he said. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.” More

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      Liz Cheney says Trump’s ‘big lie’ poisons democracy as split with Republicans grows

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      Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who voted to impeach Donald Trump, is coming under fire from members of her own party after her tweet that the former president did not lose the election unfairly. The spat illustrates the split between Republicans loyal to Trump and those willing to criticize the former president.“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” Cheney tweeted. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”Cheney, the third most senior membership of the GOP’s House leadership, has been heavily criticized by fellow Republicans in recent months for pushing back on Trump’s nonsense claims that the election was stolen, and for her impeachment vote.Trump-supporting representatives in Congress have been pushing for Cheney, the House Republican conference chair, to be removed from that powerful position, which could be achieved if House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy called for a vote on Cheney’s future. Shortly after her vote to impeach Trump, the Wyoming GOP had also voted to censure her.Some Republicans, however, have come to Cheney’s defense. “Liz Cheney is a woman of strength and conscience, and she did what she thought was right, and I salute her for that,” Senator Susan Collins from Maine said on CNN this weekend.The tension between the most-extreme and less-extreme members of the Republican party has increased in recent days, after Cheney – a member of the latter group – said those who supported the Trump-backed challenges to the certification of the 2020 election should be disqualified from becoming the 2024 Republican nominee.Cheney’s latest refusal to lie is unlikely to go down well. Politico reported on Monday morning that there is “a coordinated effort by Kevin McCarthy to box [Cheney] out”. More

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      Elizabeth Warren: Democratic party was reluctant to nominate a woman in 2020

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      In a new book, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren suggests part of the reason for her failure in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination lay in the party’s reluctance to nominate another woman.“I had to run against the shadows of Martha and Hillary,” Warren writes in Persist, which will be published on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported.Hillary Clinton, a former New York senator and secretary of state, lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.Martha Coakley, an attorney general of Massachusetts, lost a 2010 election for a US Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy, to Scott Brown, and a 2014 gubernatorial election to Charlie Baker.Both women started as favourites but suffered losses which dealt crushing blows to Democrats on the national stage.Warren led the 2020 Democratic primary early on. In her book, the Post said, she repeats a conversation with her husband, Bruce Mann, who said: “Babe, you could actually do this. You could be president.” Warren also writes about she imagined her inauguration.But she did not win any states and withdrew on 5 March. With most of the rest of the field, she endorsed Joe Biden against the progressive standard bearer, Bernie Sanders. Biden went on to beat Trump convincingly but Warren was passed over for vice-president and a cabinet post.On the page, Warren attributes some of the blame for her defeat to a failure to explain how she would pay for her ambitious progressive proposals, particularly on expanding healthcare.She also reportedly “offers a heavy dose of praise for allies and competitors and little score-settling or tale-telling”, calling Biden a “steady, decent man” and Sanders “fearless and determined”.The Post said Warren’s book “glosses over” a clash with Sanders over whether he told her a woman could not beat Trump. Warren says he did. Sanders says he did not.Warren considers a debate in Nevada in which she assailed the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg over his behaviour towards women and compared him to Trump. Warren, the Post said, writes that she was surprised Bloomberg did not immediately respond.“Like so many women in so many settings, I found myself wondering if he had even heard me,” she writes.Warren’s book, her third, also considers a previously disclosed incident at the University of Houston when she says a male colleague tried to grope her, and its effect on her academic career.The book’s title comes from a famous clash with Mitch McConnell in 2017. Attempting to silence Warren during debate, the then Republican majority leader said: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”The Post said text on the back of Warren’s book says it is about “the fight that lies ahead”.“Warren offers few hints on whether she might run again for president,” the paper said. “At 71, she is younger than Biden and could plausibly launch another campaign in 2024, particularly if he does not seek a second term.” More

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      Arizona Republicans deploy Cyber Ninjas in pro-Trump election audit

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      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

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

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      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

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

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