To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
August 19, 2021
RE: Arizona Republicans still trying to overthrow presidential election results
by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers' Voice.
The audit of election results continues in Maricopa County. Trump loyalists in the Arizona state Senate are desperately trying to prove election fraud to have something to use for the continuation of Trumpism. The Senate’s Republican majority went to court to demand an audit, and it was granted, so they used state money to set an audit going using an inexperienced, shady private contractor. This is part of the Republican Party’s efforts at voter suppression, and Republican officials in some other states are watching the process carefully, hoping to emulate it in their own home states. In Antrim County, Michigan, at attempt at getting a second audit of the election was launched by some residents. (It was later dismissed by a judge.) (1) In Wisconsin, the speaker of the state Assembly is hiring retired policemen to investigate what he considers a flawed election. (2)
The Arizona audit has nothing to do with changing the election results. No matter what this audit reveals, Joe Biden will still be president, and Donald Trump will still be out of office. So why are the Republicans in Arizona so determined to carry it out? It’s simple: they want to use any shred of evidence to bolster their claims of fraud and to shore up support for Trump’s Big Lie, that he lost only due to corrupt, deliberate miscounting tied to foreign interference. Trump himself is watching the audit carefully, sending encouragement to the auditors and using any snippet of news about the audit to proclaim he was right all along. Evidence of any little thing wrong about the election results will be used to bolster the Republican campaign of voter suppression.
The audit is being performed by a private company called Cyber Ninjas that has no previous experience doing election recounts or audits. Some well-known companies, experienced in doing audits, applied for the job, but Ninjas got the contract. Why? Apparently, it had something to do with the fact that the company’s CEO, Doug Logan, is an ardent Trumpist known for voicing his conviction that the election was stolen. Even while the audit was going on, Logan proclaimed that Maricopa County had counted 74,000 fraudulent ballots that had been smuggled in from somewhere. This claim was later debunked by the county, but that didn’t shake the Senate from its faith in Logan and his Ninjas. (3)
Those allowed to observe the methods of work by the Ninjas find them mysterious, for example the use of UV lights and magnifying glasses. It turns out that, for one thing, the Ninjas were checking to see if there were watermarks on the ballot paper. The official ballots were printed on paper with no watermarks, so they were hoping to find some fraudulent ballots that way. The other thing they’re checking for is bamboo pulp, since a favorite QAnon theory is that tens of thousands of phony ballots were smuggled in from somewhere in the Orient. Different theories abound concerning which country they're from – Vietnam, China, or Korea. One thing for sure, though: the Yellow Peril would definitely make their paper from bamboo. So far, though, the closest thing to such foreign intrigue found was a yellowish fingerprint on one ballot. The auditors were excited about this discovery until it was pointed out that someone probably ate some Cheetos before marking their ballot. (4)
The ugly racism manifested by these theories ties in with the recent wave of murderous assaults on Asian-Americans. This is also manifested in the threats against the county clerk of San Obispo County in California. A Republican himself who voted for Trump, he was nonetheless accused of election fraud by a crowd of 150 at a meeting of the county commissioners because of his name, Tommy Gong, and his Chinese-American background. Supposedly this made him an agent of the Chinese Communist Party, and so members of the crowd demanded an audit of the election he oversaw. They also demanded his resignation, and when Gong refused, threats were sent to him. (5)
Threats have also been received by the Arizona Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, who complained about the costs of the audit and the shoddy way it was being carried out. The Senate president, Karen Fann, insisted on the auditors being given all 2.1 million paper ballots from the election as well as the county’s voting machines. After the Senate’s Ninjas checked the machines, Hobbs refused to recertify them for use, saying the machines had been handled by uncertified persons and hence had their chain of custody broken. As a result, the county has now been forced to buy new voting machines at a cost of $2.8 million. The Senate had previously promised to reimburse the county for the cost of any machines that were broken, but now – no surprise! – Karen Fann refuses to keep her word. So the county and state Senate are now locked in a lawsuit. (6)
Speaking of expenses: the state Senate was allowed enough money to get the audit started, but it was supposed to finish by mid-May. It turns out that hand-counting 2.1 million ballots takes quite a lot of time, even with sloppy work, and in order to be completed the job will cost a lot more. So the Republican Senators have turned to private enterprise for the funds. They are making the rounds, hitting up their favorite millionaires for money to continue their circus. The supposed quest for integrity turns out to be a private-interest shell game paid for by the rich.
Some Republicans have opposed this farce. Some are afraid it gives the Republican Party or the state of Arizona a bad name. Even the conservative journal, National Review, has printed an article lambasting it. (7) But the sharpest critics are the county commissioners of Maricopa County, the local politicians who have been charged with fraud by the Senate investigation. After the Ninjas and Karen Fann publicly accused them of deleting the voter database so it could not be checked, they denied it and cried “Enough!”, vowing no further cooperation with the Senate audit. The Ninjas later admitted their accusation was a mistake, but Fann is plowing ahead with the audit, months and millions of dollars later. (8)
What do the leaders of the Democrats, the other big bourgeois party, have to say about all this? Biden’s Dept. of Justice sent a warning to Karen Fann that her audit was being investigated for possible infringements of the Voting Rights Act. The letter said certain of Fann’s plans could be interpreted as voter intimidation – namely, her plan to interview citizens about how they voted. That’s right: Fann planned to send state investigators to people’s homes with a copy of their secret ballot and ask them to confirm they voted the way the ballot was filled out. Well, yeah! I guess you might interpret that as voter intimidation – being grilled by police investigators about how you voted! Fann’s response was to give up her plan for the citizen interviews, but she still insists on going ahead with her phony audit.
The flimsy response of Biden’s government allows this farce to continue. The fact that a non-certified band of mercenaries, paid out of private funds to carry out a partisan witch hunt, can be allowed to mishandle millions of secret ballots is a complete violation of norms, if not of laws. And by standing aside passively the federal government allows the Republicans’ voter suppression campaign to intensify, in Texas and elsewhere.
What’s needed to stop this campaign is mass political mobilization
against it. Democratic leaders in Congress are dreaming of their
omnibus bill, HR1, that will supposedly solve all problems. But
Democratic Senators seem to be afraid of offending their Republican
colleagues and to jettison the filibuster rule, which is the only way
they have a chance of passing HR1. In fact, it’s unlikely that all 50
Senate Democrats would vote for the bill as it stands. In the meantime,
their dream is a diversion from the hard work of organizing opposition
to voter suppression. <>
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