Republicans in Arizona’s largest county are escalating their defense of their 2020 vote count, putting them increasingly at odds with former President Donald Trump and a sizeable chunk of their party that believes without evidence that something was amiss.
Maricopa County’s top officials, almost all of them Republicans, on Monday blasted the GOP state Senate president and the auditors she hired to run an unprecedented, partisan recount in the county. Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, said Karen Fann is making an “attempt at legitimatizing a grift disguised as an audit.”
“This board is done explaining anything to these people who are playing investigator with our constituents’ ballots and equipment paid for with real people’s tax dollars,” Sellers said at the start of an extraordinary meeting to refute allegations of wrongdoing raised last week by Fann and amplified by Trump.
The showdown in Phoenix follows several days of heated rhetoric stemming from the state Senate’s unprecedented, partisan recount and audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County. The Senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1 million ballots, the machines that counted them, and hard drives full of data, then hired a firm run by a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies to comb through all of it.
Promoted heavily in right-wing media, the audit has become a cause celebre among some of Trump’s most loyal fans, who believe it will uncover evidence of the former president’s claim that he was the rightful winner of the election.
Senate President Karen Fann last week sent a letter to Sellers questioning records that document the chain of custody of the ballots and accusing county officials of deleting data.
Trump sent a statement saying, in part, that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms.”
Sellers pushed back, accusing the Senate’s contractors of incompetence. The Senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm with no experience in election audits whose owner, Doug Logan, shared far-fetched allegations of election fraud on his now-deleted Twitter account.
“They can’t find the files because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Sellers said. “We wouldn’t be asked to do this on-the-job training if qualified auditors had been hired to do this work.”
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, one of the county’s top election officials, on Saturday called the statement “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.
“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.
Richer was elected in the same election many in his party are now questioning, defeating an incumbent Democrat. As recorder, he oversees the voter registration database and the mail voting operation, including signature verification, while the county board oversees the team charged with election-day operations and counting ballots.
Republicans who have disputed fraud allegations have faced a severe backlash.
Clint Hickman, who until recently was the GOP chairman of the Board of Supervisors, has been the subject of conspiracy theories, including that a massive fire at the egg-producing farm his family owns was cover for burning Trump ballots.
State Sen. Paul Boyer had to change his phone number, flee his house with his wife and young son and get police protection after he voted against holding the Board of Supervisors in contempt earlier this year. His vote killed a resolution that would have authorized the arrest of county officials during a dispute over whether the Senate had the power to subpoena ballots.
Boyer recently said the Senate’s handling of the audit has been embarrassing.
Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
