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Tag: Mark Finchem

  • Republicans Cry Conspiracy Over Ballot Printing Error In Arizona

    Republicans Cry Conspiracy Over Ballot Printing Error In Arizona

    Early Tuesday morning, Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing activist with close ties to the Trump family, shared a video of a poll worker in conservative Anthem, Arizona, announcing to a line of waiting voters that one of the polling place’s two tabulators was broken. The other successfully scanned completed ballots only 75% of the time.

    “It could be a printer issue, or it could be the tabulator itself,” the Maricopa County poll worker said before adding that voters experiencing difficulty could simply drop off their ballot in a box attached to the tabulator, labeled “Box Three,” to be counted later at a tabulation center — the method used by most Arizona counties.

    The tabulation issues were affecting about 20% of polling locations, the county’s Board of Supervisors chair Bill Gates (R) said in a video posted on social media, before emphasizing that voters could also go to another polling place if they were experiencing issues. (Voters in Arizona can vote in multiple locations within a county rather than being bound to a neighborhood-specific polling location.)

    Within a few hours, the county had identified and apologized for the issue: printer settings. “It appears some of the printers were not producing dark enough timing marks on the ballots,” a press release read. County Recorder Stephen Richer (R) assured voters that “every legal vote will be tabulated,” regardless of the machine errors.

    But it was too late. Republican politicians had already primed voters to expect under-handed tactics from Maricopa County, a Democratic stronghold home to more than half of Arizona’s population and also the target of the conspiracy theory-fueled “audit” in 2021 that Republicans used to push false voter fraud claims. They knew what was really going on.

    The video Kirk shared showed that people waiting in line were angry. Some began reciting GOP talking points about ballot tabulators: “You need to get rid of the machines!” someone says off camera. “I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there! That happens all the time,” another woman said before leaving the line.

    “I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there! That happens all the time.”

    – Maricopa County voter, responding to ballot tabulation issues

    Before long, “cheating” was trending on Twitter, and a popular pro-Donald Trump forum had pinned a post on “Box 3” to the top of its page, NBC News reported.

    Around the web, commenters said the problems were “by design” and evidence that “Democrats are cheating again,” according to the Election Integrity Partnership, which tracks election-related misinformation and disinformation.

    Republican politicians across the country, especially in Arizona, have raised the prospect of rejecting election outcomes if they lose — tapping into widespread GOP beliefs of systematic election fraud — and only accepting them if they win.

    But on Tuesday, the Arizona GOP faced a more immediate problem: How could they incorporate the tabulation problems into their existing false claims about widespread election theft without discouraging supporters enough to make them skip voting altogether? The answer: Demonize Maricopa County, but urge voters to stick with the process.

    “There’s a lot of bad things going on. … They want to delay you out of voting,” Trump intoned ominously on Truth Social, urging Maricopa County voters to stay in line.

    “Go overwhelm the BS,” Donald Trump Jr., his son, wrote on Twitter. “If you absolutely have to come back later, but cast your vote at all costs!!!”

    Mark Finchem, the Arizona GOP secretary of state candidate who pushed the legally impossible proposal to “decertify” the 2020 election results, also weighed in on Twitter. “Why is it always Maricopa?” tweeted Finchem. Later, he tweeted at a congressional candidate who said, “this will be the last illegally ran election in AZ!” because Finchem would bring “competence” to the secretary of state’s office.

    “Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home,” Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters wrote after wondering whether the problems were “incompetence or something worse.”

    Two others — state GOP chair Kelli Ward and Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor — claimed that the problem disproportionately affected conservative areas. There was no clear evidence supporting those claims, and neither Lake’s campaign nor the Arizona GOP responded to HuffPost’s questions.

    “PSA: Hey, Maricopa County voters! Go vote in a Democrat stronghold. The machines and ballots seem to be fine there,” Ward wrote.

    In “the heart of liberal Phoenix,” Lake said, “they’ve had zero problems with their machines today.”

    Still, as the day progressed, there were signs that Republicans were changing their strategy to adapt to the machine issues. In a Tuesday morning flier, Ward urged voters, “do not put your ballot in ‘box 3’ or ‘door 3.’” A few hours later, Finchem shared a graphic from the Lake campaign advising supporters to use the boxes “as a last resort.”

    And, in a lawsuit filed in a Maricopa County court Tuesday, the national Republican Party sought to extend polling place hours until 10 p.m. After a 20-minute hearing, a judge denied the request.

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  • Some GOP Counties Want To Hand-Count All Ballots—But Judges Say That’s Illegal

    Some GOP Counties Want To Hand-Count All Ballots—But Judges Say That’s Illegal

    Topline

    A judge on Monday blocked a rural Arizona county from moving forward with a plan by Republican officials to hand-count every ballot cast in Tuesday’s midterm, shutting down the latest attempt by swing-state officials to pore through votes by hand this year—a push driven in part by evidence-free allegations that voting machines are rife with fraud.

    Key Facts

    Judge Casey McGinley ruled that Cochise County—a sparsely populated area on the U.S.-Mexico border—can’t tally its votes using both machines and a manual count, arguing this process violates state election rules that only allow counties to hand-count a small number of randomly selected ballots in order to check for accuracy.

    The county’s board of supervisors voted 2-1 last month to order a hand count, citing voters’ concerns about election integrity, with the county’s two Republican supervisors voting yes while the body’s lone Democrat voted no, according to the Associated Press.

    A group of retirees represented by prominent Democratic attorney Marc Elias’ law firm sued the county, arguing a manual count “will sow confusion among voters and undermine the public’s confidence in Arizona’s elections.”

    Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs (D) argued in a brief that Cochise County’s hand-counting plan could raise ballot security concerns, lead to inaccuracies and “threaten the County’s ability to timely canvass its election.”

    Meanwhile, an attorney for County Recorder David Stevens, who handles voter registration and was tasked with helping to oversee the hand count, has said there’s no harm in checking for accuracy by counting ballots twice—once by machine and once by hand—and stated he had a plan to finish the count before a state-imposed deadline.

    Stevens’ lawyer also argued the county is protected by a provision in Arizona’s election rules that give counties the discretion to hand-count more ballots than the minimum required to check for accuracy (Judge McGinley said Monday this policy doesn’t give officials the power to count every single vote from every precinct).

    Chief Critic

    “Allowing Cochise County to proceed with an unlawful full hand count – motivated by baseless conspiracy theories – would set a dangerous precedent and inject chaos, disruption, and insecurity in the middle of an election,” Hobbs’ office said in its amicus brief.

    Contra

    “No voter will be negatively impacted by this decision [to hand-count ballots],” Stevens’ attorney argued in court papers. “The expanded hand count will merely serve as an additional confirmation of the accuracy of that process.”

    Surprising Fact

    Cochise County isn’t the only place where courts have scuttled plans to hand-count every ballot. Officials in rural Nye County, Nevada, began counting early ballots by hand over a week ago, citing suspicion about voting machines, but the state Supreme Court ruled the process was illegal, forcing it to grind to a halt after just two days. And Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem (R)—both of whom have promoted false voter fraud allegations—filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Hobbs seeking to bar the use of voting machines and require hand counts statewide.

    Tangent

    If the goal of hand-counting ballots is to make elections more reliable, many experts think this approach could backfire. Hand counts are prone to human error and can lead to mistakes in vote tallies, according to some research. Manually counting ballots is also slow: On the first day of Nye County’s hand count last month, some groups of volunteers took three hours to count just 50 ballots, and mistakes led to time-consuming recounts, the AP reported.

    Key Background

    This week’s midterms are the first nationwide elections since the 2020 presidential race, which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed was ridden by fraud. Since then, many Republican voters and elected officials have echoed Trump’s unproven voter fraud allegations and called for wide-ranging changes to how elections are conducted, often fixating on unsubstantiated claims that voting machines are rigged. Last year, Arizona’s GOP-controlled state Senate commissioned an “audit” of ballots cast in 2020 in Maricopa County to look for evidence of fraud, kicking off an often-bizarre process that reportedly included inspecting some ballots for traces of bamboo to assuage conspiracy theorists who believed phony votes were shipped in from Asia. The audit—led by an obscure company called Cyber Ninjas—confirmed President Joe Biden’s win in the county. And earlier this year, officials in a small New Mexico county briefly refused to certify the results of a midterm election due to vague and unfounded concerns about voting machines, though they eventually signed off on the election results due to an order from the state Supreme Court.

    Joe Walsh, Forbes Staff

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  • The Radical Fringe That Just Went Mainstream in Arizona

    The Radical Fringe That Just Went Mainstream in Arizona

    It might be nice one day to wake up and feel serene—even hopeful—about the state of American politics. To know that all of those people who have been warning about the growing threat to democracy are way ahead of their skis. But today is not that day.

    Arizona Republicans are nominating an entire cast of characters who argue not only that Donald Trump won the election in 2020, but also that the state’s results should be decertified—a process for which there is no legal basis. These Trump-endorsed candidates—Kari Lake for governor, Mark Finchem for secretary of state, Abraham Hamadeh for attorney general, Blake Masters for senator—all won their respective primaries this week and are now one election away from political power.

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    Some strategists might frame these Republican wins as a gift to Democrats, and you can look at it that way. Democrats will be more competitive in the upcoming midterms than they might have been if more reasonable Republicans were on the ballot. Moderates and independents abound in Arizona, and they aren’t going to be excited to vote for a passel of kooks. But that doesn’t change the simple fact that the fundamentals are on Republicans’ side this year: Joe Biden is still unpopular; inflation is still high; America might soon be entering a recession.

    “Nobody should be popping champagne,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. “This is the most antidemocracy slate of candidates in the country. We’re in a very dangerous situation.”

    “Stop the Steal” candidates are running—and winning—all over the country. But Arizona concentrates a lot of them within a single geographic area—like an ant farm of election deniers.

    Lake might prove the most significant of these candidates. Lake’s lead over her top Republican opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, had grown to nearly 3 percent when the gubernatorial primary race was finally called in her favor on Thursday night. Before becoming an enthusiastic proponent of Trump’s election lies, Lake was a local TV-news anchor, making her a household name in Arizona and giving her something that many political candidates lack: confidence in front of the camera. Like Trump, Lake has a difficult-to-describe magnetism with Republican-base voters; they simply cannot get enough of her.

    Throughout her campaign, Lake has called Biden an “illegitimate president” and vowed that, if she becomes governor, she’ll be reviewing and decertifying Arizona’s 2020 election results—despite multiple audits (and even a partisan review) showing precisely zero evidence of widespread fraud. Even ahead of the primary, Lake claimed to have evidence of funny business; the NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard tried to get Lake to share some of that evidence, but she would not. Lake and Finchem, the cowboy-hat-wearing would-be secretary of state whom I profiled last month, have been cooking up new ways supposedly to prevent fraud—by banning voting machines and early voting. Both Lake and Finchem primed voters to believe that, if they lost, only fraud would explain their losses. Of course they did. That’s the new Republican playbook, and these two know it better than anyone.

    Lake’s opponent in November, Katie Hobbs, is Arizona’s former secretary of state and a run-of-the-mill Democrat who will probably try to position herself as the sane, competent foil to Lake’s wild-eyed conspiracy monger. That’s a solid strategy—maybe the only one that can work. But Hobbs is so run-of-the-mill that she’s boring. And what Hobbs lacks in personality, she makes up for in baggage, after a former staffer successfully sued last year over discrimination. For Arizonans who are still fans of democracy, though, Hobbs is the obvious choice—an apt example of the “Terrible Candidate/Important Election” scenario that my colleague Caitlin Flanagan described this week.

    David A. Graham: Well, the cover-up sure isn’t making January 6 look any better

    Arizona Democrats like Hobbs do have a genuine shot at defeating this slate of extremists. The basic fact of these Republicans’ extremism makes all Democratic candidates look better by comparison. Many independent voters, who count for something like one-third of all Arizona voters, and moderate Republicans would probably have happily voted for any Republican but Lake; come November, some of them may be willing to turn that into any candidate but Lake. Plus, Democrats seem to have gotten their groove back in recent weeks. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., reached a long-elusive deal on sweeping climate legislation; gas prices are dropping fast; and the overturning of Roe v. Wade might energize an otherwise sleepy set of Democratic voters just in time for the midterms.

    And yet. Despite what hopeful Democrats might tell you, Arizona isn’t a purple state; it’s more of a lightish red. And this year remains an excellent year for Republicans—probably the best chance for any Republican extremist to make it into elected office not just in Arizona, but anywhere in the country. “When the political party in power has a president running in the mid- or upper 30s and inflation is high and people are feeling recession-y?” Longwell said. “You’re in a danger point. You just are.”

    The danger of a Lake or Finchem election in November is pretty straightforward, as I’ve outlined in previous stories. State leaders can easily cast doubt on an election’s results if the outcome doesn’t suit them, and this entire slate of Arizona Republicans is clearly prepared to do that. Governors and secretaries of state can tinker with election procedures or propose absurd new requirements, such as having every voter reregister to vote, as the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, has suggested. What happens if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election comes down to a closely divided Arizona? What if such a pivotal state was run not by Democrats and Republicans who are loyal to the democratic process, but by conspiracy-drunk partisans who won’t stop until they see their candidate swearing on a Bible? There’s a reason Trump has endorsed this slate; he knows these candidates will be pulling for him no matter what.

    Maybe the most important thing to note is that whatever happens to these Trump sycophants in November, they’ve demonstrated that a not-insignificant number of Republican voters want them—the cream of the conspiracy crop—to lead their party. In Tuesday’s primary, Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican speaker of the house who did not cooperate with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, lost his State Senate race to an election denier. Lake, who has become a household name in Trumpworld and raked in campaign donations from across the country, will be well positioned, whatever the coming election result, to be a MAGA superstar.

    If you’re still tallying up Trump’s primary wins and losses as an indicator of his grip on the party, you’re missing the point. The man’s enduring legacy is figures like Lake and a GOP packed with cranks and conspiracy theorists. “They will be defining the next generation of Republicans, and [Lake] will be among the next generation of leaders,” Longwell said. “If she wins, or even if she loses.”

    Elaine Godfrey

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