The clown show continues in Arizona with the recent election as the Trumper "voting fraud" candidates push absurd claims. Judge dismisses Arizona election deniers’ lawsuit demanding a hand count of Nov. ballots https://www.rawstory.com/kari-lake-mark-finchem/
Let's check in with Arizona's Republican candidate for Secretary of State. In Arizona the Secretary of State runs the elections. New Video Shows Trump’s Pick to Run AZ Elections Accusing Pence of ‘Coup’ Mark Finchem was caught on camera spouting conspiracy theories about Vice President Mike Pence stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-v...ions-mark-finchem-accusing-mike-pence-of-coup
I knew it...Mike Pence was the one that put Joe Biden into the Oval Office after Trump grabbed Pence's wife by her p****. wrbtraderr
'Welcome to fascism': Arizona GOP House speaker slams election deniers https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...peaker-slams-proposed-post-2020-election-laws
It's so much easier for someone in the GOP to slam election deniers when they're leaving a political office or they've lost a recent election. Much more difficult with more risks for someone to do the same prior to running for re-election. wrbtrader
Question for the RINO Maricopy county officials who have opposed and wasted millions upon millions of tax dollars opposing the Arizona audit every step of the way, if you have nothing to hide, you will cooperate and the Arizona audit will exonerate you? Compare this with a correspondent audit of the IRS. The moment the IRS sent you an adjustment of your taxes paid, they already know they have you. Now, do you act like the Maricopy county officials who are RINOs fighting at every step? If you did, the IRS would dig even deeper and you probably, will end up paying much, much more. You know you have caught the cheaters when they continue to fight every step of the way instead, of merely cooperating like innocent people do.
Arizona Republicans' election integrity unit was a crooked con job from the beginning. Election "integrity" investigations in Arizona are in large part led by the very conspiracy theorists who themselves pushed fraudulent election claims; since they all turned out to be liars, when their claims were investigated the first time around, Republicans naturally gave them a government-paid do-over to hunt for the evidence they say is still out there. It's a flim-flam. These people are con artists, sucking up government resources for their own personal fame and benefit. Republican state Attorney General Mark Brnovich hired Wright to extend the fraud-o-rama circus as long as it could be extended, using his perch to shovel government funding toward advertising each partisan hoax under the generic banner of "investigating" them, and assuredly chose Wright as his ridiculous partner specifically because of her partisan, hoax-peddling nature. Like, for example, the "Cyber Ninjas" proto-hoaxers claiming "suspicious" ballot signatures. The "True the Vote" hoaxers, whose claims have unceasingly been proven false—at least, on the few occasions when the hoaxers provide any details that could conceivably be tested to begin with. The laughably ridiculous "2000 Mules" claims of rampant ballot fraud based solely on the data-mined claim that 2000 Americans throughout the country were somewhere in the general vicinity of a ballot drop box—boxes which are by their nature placed in heavily trafficked public locations—more than once during the election season. And yet, in Arizona, none of the hoaxes that Republicans first promoted and then funneled money to conspiracy theorists to "investigate" in perpetuity are going away. That's because the investigators are appearing on right-wing podcasts, and their supposed new avenues of investigation are being promoted by right-wing hoax promoters, and all involved are dismissing questions about the utter failures of their investigators with new intonations that well now, they're still getting to the bottom of all this, and they'll be getting to the bottom of it from now until the sun burns out. As more states create election integrity units, Arizona is a cautionary tale Over three years, a high-profile investigation team found little fraud, sapped government resources and deepened suspicions https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/26/arizona-election-integrity-unit/ PHOENIX — Republicans across the country have embraced an aggressive tactic this year as they seek to tout baseless claims that voter fraud is a serious threat: arming state agencies with more power and resources to investigate election crimes. Virginia’s Republican attorney general earlier this month announced a new election integrity unit staffed with more than 20 attorneys and investigators “to increase transparency and strengthen confidence in our state elections.” Georgia legislators recently empowered the statewide police agency to launch election probes. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last month described the arrests of 20 people for alleged illegal voting as the “opening salvo” of a new elections police force. But a Washington Post examination of an earlier endeavor in Arizona to systematically ferret out voter fraud found it has turned up few cases — and that rather than bolster confidence in elections, the absence of massive fraud has just fueled more bogus theories and distrust. After investigating thousands of complaints in the past three years, a special unit in the Arizona attorney general’s office created to crack down on illegal voting and other election-related crimes has prosecuted just 20 cases in a state of more than 4 million voters. The total represents a slight increase from the 16 cases brought by the office in a previous six-year period, according to court filings and hundreds of pages of public records. Most prosecutions are small-bore, isolated cases of illegal voting, such as six felons who cast ballots though their voting rights were not restored, and three women who turned in ballots for their mothers, who had recently died. Some Republicans who have falsely claimed voter fraud is rampant now say the limited number of prosecutions shows that the unit is not doing its job.Leading supporters of former president Donald Trump in Arizona, including the Republican nominees for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, are pushing to allocate even more resources to rooting out election crimes. Arizona’s experience shows the damaging consequences that can result when public officials use their power to reinforce false claims that voter fraud is a significant issue in American elections. Rather than reassure citizens about the strength of the Arizona voting systems, the state’s election crimes unit deepened suspicions among many of those who deny President Biden won and sapped government resources, The Post’s review found. “We’ve invented the smoke in order to say there’s a fire,” said Rusty Bowers, the Republican leader of the Arizona House, who fought attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Katie Conner, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R), said the election integrity unit has “a number of ongoing criminal cases” and is fulfilling its mission by closing out thousands of election-related complaints. “As a prosecutorial agency,” Conner said, “we deal in facts and evidence.” But Republicans who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 elections say they expected more from the unit. “It does make you wonder why aren’t they doing anything,” said state Sen. Kelly Townsend (R), who helped create the unit but is now skeptical of it. “Except for a handful of individuals, but that’s nothing new.” Unit’s creation followed Democratic wins Arizona launched its election integrity unit several months after the 2018 midterm election brought top-to-bottom wins for Democrats. In the marquee U.S. Senate race, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema beat Trump-endorsed Republican Martha McSally after a protracted vote count. Trump declared ballots had appeared “out of the wilderness” for Sinema, an unsubstantiated claim that took hold among his supporters. The next year, Republicans created an election integrity team in the attorney general’s office, similar to a program run by the Texas attorney general. The unit was allocated $530,000 for a full-time criminal prosecutor, civil attorney, special agent and administration assistant, though public records show other employees in the attorney general’s office are pulled in to investigate election complaints at times. Elections officials argued that Arizona’s voting systems were secure. Democrats cast the unit as a response to their electoral success. The unit also helps uphold Arizona election laws that critics say limit voter participation. In what Brnovich hailed as “the most important election integrity case decided by the Supreme Court in years,” the office defended state laws allowing counties to require voters to cast ballots in their assigned precincts and banning most people from gathering and submitting the ballots of non-relatives. To lead the unit, Brnovich chose Jennifer Wright, a lawyer whose 2011 bid for Phoenix mayor was backed by tea party activists. From 2010 to 2014, Wright co-chaired Verify the Vote Arizona and worked closely with True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that has made uncorroborated claims of rampant election fraud around the country. “We’ve all been made aware that there are forces at work to steal power from the people by manipulating the vote,” Wright said in a 2012 video to help True the Vote recruit volunteers to monitor polls on Election Day. “Remember upwards to 20 percent [of poll watchers] are going to find issues that, absent their presence, could have resulted in a fraudulent vote being cast.” Wright is in charge of reviewing complaints referred to the election integrity unit and deciding which ones to forward to the criminal division, records show. Wright frequently reposts Twitter comments by far-right voices and tweets attacks on coronavirus vaccines, abortion and various Democrats, including Sinema and Biden.Her account is labeled “personal account” but includes public announcements about the election integrity unit. Wright did not respond to requests for an interview with The Post. Conner, the office spokesperson, said all attorneys in the election integrity unit enforce the law “regardless of their personal beliefs.” “Their First Amendment rights do not end when they work for a government agency,” she said. After the 2020 election, allegations of fraud again churned through Arizona. Biden’s win in sprawling Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, helped him become the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1996. In an interview days after the election, Brnovich rejected the idea that fraud had marred the results. “If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,” he said, noting down-ballot victories by some Republicans. But within several weeks, the unit was swamped with more than 2,000 complaints,Wright said at a legislative hearing. “The unit is fully investigating these allegations, and intends to prosecute every substantiated allegation, but criminal investigations take time,” she told lawmakers. Many of those complaints were unsubstantiated. For example, the unit examined a flood of reports that ballots marked with Sharpie markers were miscounted or disregarded. Brnovich’s office quickly determined that didn’t happen, and those voters were not disenfranchised. Of the 20 cases the unit has prosecuted, none changed the outcome of an election. Some had no bearing on vote counts at all, involving crimes like videotaping inside a polling place, making illegal campaign donations and forging signatures to qualify as a candidate. One case was thrown out by a judge. One defendant was ruled mentally incompetent. The cases also illustrate how fraud is often rooted in mistakes or confusion, not secret plots. Melinda Sue Baird, 57, who lives in the Phoenix area, was one of those who got caught in the unit’s net. Baird said that in the weeks before her mother’s death in October 2020, the 87-year-old woman, a C-SPAN enthusiast, told everyone from family members to hospice workers that voting was her final wish. Baird took her mother’s ballot home. “I wept over it and cried over it,” she said. Baird had helped fill out the ballot, which is legal, but instead of indicating that she assisted her mother and signing her own name, she forged her mother’s signature. Last year, Baird plead guilty to “presenting a false instrument” and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine. “I didn’t even hire an attorney because I was so ashamed and wanted to accept responsibility for the mistake I made,” she said. Baird’s husband, Mark Baird, is as angry as she is contrite. He argued that Brnovich should be arresting the 11 Trump supporters who falsely signed electoral college certificates in December 2020 even though Biden won the state. “If you’re going to go after her, then he should be going after a slate of people that knowingly tried to subvert a free and fair election and signed their name to it,” he said. In an interview with an Arizona radio station in January, Brnovich referred questions about the fake Trump electors to the Department of Justice. In one of the six cases involving felons, Victor Manuel Aguirre, 47, said he registered during a voting rights drive at the Pima County Jail, where he was being held, according to a transcript of his sentencing last month. Aguirre was told that if he wasn’t eligible because of his felony record, his registration would be discarded, according to his lawyer, Anne Elsberry.Under Arizona law, a person convicted of two or more felonies must petition the court for restoration of their civil rights. At the hearing, the unit’s lead criminal prosecutor, Todd Lawson, acknowledged problems with the state’s “gatekeeper functions”to keep felons off the voting rolls. Pima County Superior Court Judge Javier Chon-Lopez sentenced Aguirre to the minimum term of six months. “It appears that he was doing a lot better in his life,” the judge said. “He appears to be genuine in his belief that if he wasn’t qualified to vote that somebody would cancel his application.” Like the people with felony convictions recently arrested again on illegal voting charges in Florida, Aguirre received a voting card in the mail and figured he was eligible, Elsberry said in an interview. “This was the first time he ever voted in his life,” Elsberry said. “He’s very confused about why he got into trouble.” Though the number of election fraud cases is small, some Republicans say the unit fulfills an important public service. State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R) said the prosecutions “show the public that any instance of fraud is wrong.” Leslie Hoffman, a Republican who until recently helped oversee Yavapai County elections, said the unit is worthwhile because those with complaints “felt like they had a place to go.” A hyper-focus on the state’s most populous county As the unit investigated individual cases, Brnovich also directed it to scrutinize claims that voting irregularities tainted Biden’s close margin of victory in Maricopa County. Republican lawmakers had commissioned a review of Maricopa County by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm that had never audited an election before and was led by a “stop the steal” proponent. In September 2021, that review confirmed Biden’s win, but days later, the attorney general launched his own probe. By then, Brnovich was running in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in which Trump’s support was viewed as pivotal. “Hopefully he’s going to do what everybody knows has to be done,” Trump had warned at a Phoenix rally. Investigators interviewed current and former elections officials and blitzed Maricopa County with requests for information. In a sign the former president’s allies were paying attention, one of Wright’s letters to Maricopa, which asked for an extensive list of documents, was highlighted by Trump’s Save America political committee. Maricopa officials grew frustrated. “My team has, in less than two weeks, gone through every claim made,” wrote Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder, in October. “They are all meritless.” Investigators with the unit also interacted with people promoting false and disputed claims of election fraud. For example,records show Wright requested voting data from Maricopa in March based on “pilot studies” on suspicious ballot signatures done by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, an engineer hired by Cyber Ninjas and the Senate for a ballot analysis. Ayyadurai has made a series of discredited claims, including that Michigan voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden. Ayyadurai did not respond to request for comment. That request won praise from Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, an election denier, who wrote on Telegram, “Assistant attorney general Jennifer Wright gets muscular.” Maricopa officials said trained county employees had verified the signatures on all mail ballots. Amid mounting pressure from Trump and his supporters, Brnovich released an April “interim report,”an unusual step in law enforcement that exacerbated concerns about Maricopa’s voting systems.The report said there were “questions” about the 2020 vote and that the system had “serious vulnerabilities” that demanded lawmakers’ attention. “Our office has left no stone unturned in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Brnovich wrote, adding that he was limited in what he could reveal about “specific criminal and civil investigations.” The next day, four months before the Republican primary, Brnovich went on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which is popular among right-wing election deniers. He implied that the investigation would turn up much more. “This is the proverbial kind of shot across the bow,” Brnovich told the former Trump adviser. “And I hope people understand that I know how important this is. And maybe it’s not as fast sometimes as people like. But it’s more important to get it right than fast.'' Maricopa officials blasted the interim report. In an interview, Bill Gates, Republican chairman of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, accused the unit of operating in bad faith. “The attorney general used a thoroughly discredited report as a basis to subject the county to months of harassment, and people living in fear of being indicted,” he said. “It’s been an abuse of public resources.” The county estimates that its employees have spent about 3,000 hours responding to the attorney general’s inquiry and that it has paid about $420,000 in legal fees. Despite that intense scrutiny, only two Maricopa County residents have been charged by the attorney general’s office with illegally voting in the 2020 election. “They have not prosecuted any more cases than the office would have done without it,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), a gubernatorial candidate who has been at odds with Brnovich over election procedures, “and instead have wasted countless taxpayer dollars, time, and desperately needed resources that could have gone towards elections administration instead of chasing down conspiracy theories that had already been debunked.” Conner, the spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the report was intended to flag areas for improvement. “If people don’t like what [the election integrity unit] is doing, they need to reach out to lawmakers.” But by assigning investigators to dig into even the most far-fetched complaints, the attorney general’s office seems to have emboldened some election deniers — and legitimized claims strongly disputed by county officials. Heather Honey of Verity Vote, a citizens watchdog group that scrutinizes elections for irregularities, boasted that its complaint about Maricopa’s handling of early ballots in 2020 was echoed in the attorney general’s report. “We actually met with the attorney general’s investigators,” Honey said in a May interview with Cleta Mitchell, one of the key lawyers involved with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. “And we said, ‘Hey, you know, this is what we found.’” The election integrity unit has also met “several times” with representatives of the leading election conspiracy group, True the Vote, records show. The attorney general’s office has told the group it is interested in its findings related to the “2000 Mules” film, which purports to use cellphone geolocation data to prove “mules” illegally gathered ballots in Arizona and other states. The movie has been widely discredited, in part because the data is imprecise. Yet the attorney general’s office told True the Vote leaders twice in June that it was “willing to provide for your flights and hotel accommodations.” Neither the attorney general’s office or True the Vote responded to questions about the proposed meeting. A True the Vote spokesman said it achieved its goal “to support fair election processes.” The efforts by the attorney general’s office did not satisfy Trump, who endorsed Brnovich’s rival, venture capitalist Blake Masters. Masters “knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it,” Trump said in June. One day before the primary election, Brnovich said his office had spent “hundreds of hours” reviewing allegations that 282 dead people voted and confirmed only one. “Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased,” he wrote.It was a long-awaited debunking by the state’s top prosecutor of one baseless but persistent claim about the 2020 election. The next day, Brnovich lost the primary to Masters. “It would have been much easier for General Brnovich to say there was widespread fraud or that the election was stolen,” Conner said. “He has integrity, and that’s why he didn’t make claims he didn’t believe in even though it may have cost him the Senate race.” The attorney general has about four months left in office, but it is unclear where the investigation goes from here. Conner declined to answer when a final report would be issued.
Basically, the Arizona Audit has shown GOP conspiracy theorists with no evidence of mass election fraud versus GOP members that found a few cases of election fraud on both sides (Republicans & Democrats) that want to create more secure elections for the state of Arizona. At this point, I'm not sure what the GOP conspiracy theorists want especially now that the country is getting ready for the November mid-terms in which statistically the GOP will takeover as expected because Americans are not happy with Inflation, rising cost of living, the impact of the Ukraine/Russia War on the economy of America, Vaccine mandates although they're now removed, heated Abortion issues, big spending although less than Trump and so on. It's time for the GOP conspiracy theorists to get in step with the rest of their party and prepare to run the country. The mid-term elections are around the corner and nobody wants to waste any more time, energy, and money on that election fraud bullshit anymore...there are other important issues in America. As for those fake electors...the DOJ will take care of that. Thus, I expect prosecution (prison sentence) in those cases and that's something the mid-term elections can not stop because that's more than just fraud...it involves treason of our constitution and democracy. wrbtrader
The adventure with these clowns continues... Arizona candidate wants to ban mail-in voting. He uses it a lot. Report shows Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorist running for Arizona secretary of state, has voted by mail in 28 of the past 30 elections. https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/arizona-finchem-mail-voting-hypocrisy-rcna51005
Plus we have this stupidity from this clown, Mark Finchem, who apparently does not understand what the "noindex" configuration means on his website. Is it even possible for a candidate and his staff to be so stupid? Mark Finchem says Google and the ‘deep state’ are blocking his campaign site. The truth is simpler — and implicates his own team. If he wins in November, the Trump-backed “Stop the Steal” proponent would run Arizona’s elections as secretary of state. https://www.grid.news/story/misinfo...truth-is-simpler-and-implicates-his-own-team/ Update: Several hours after publication of this piece, Finchem’s website was changed to remove the “noindex” directive that blocked it from Google and other search engines. The Trump-endorsed, QAnon-friendly Arizona legislator who won the Republican nomination for secretary of state is amplifying yet another conspiracy theory: that Big Tech is suppressing his campaign. But it wasn’t a “deep state algorithm” that was hiding his website in Google search results, as the candidate, Mark Finchem, claimed on social media. Instead, the culprit was the campaign site’s own code. “There are two possibilities here,” said Will Adler, senior technologist for elections and democracy with the Center for Democracy and Technology. “One is that the Finchem campaign has incorrectly set its site not to be indexed. “The other is that the campaign purposely set it to not be indexed, so Finchem could falsely blame ‘the algorithm’ for his website not being indexed.” Reached by phone, Finchem declined to speak but asked Grid to call him back later. He did not answer subsequent calls. Republican politicians have long argued that major technology companies, especially Google and Facebook, have targeted conservative voices. Those arguments usually depend on cherry-picked data or misunderstood studies, but have nonetheless been championed by party leaders from longtime senators to Trump himself. In Finchem’s case, to change the code on his campaign site, someone would most likely have to commit a deliberate act, said CDT’s Adler. In the software Finchem’s team appears to be using, “a person would have to click ‘no’ on the option, ‘show in search results,’” Adler said, “which seems like a strange thing to do when you’re running a campaign, frankly.” Finchem is one of the foremost pitchmen for the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement. From the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to audiences large and small across the country, Finchem has tirelessly promoted the fraudulent trope that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Finchem argued that his pledge to investigate election fraud if elected motivated Google to block its billions of search users from finding his campaign website. “Google & the crooks in California refuse to rank my website in their deep state algorithm,” he tweeted early Wednesday morning, because they “DON’T want me to look at election corruption in Arizona.” “Please share my website & link to it so that the voters can see it,” he added. A few hours later, he tweeted another appeal to his 52,000 followers to share the URL of his website, claiming that “Google has deplatformed it off of the search results.” He also posted the appeals to Gettr, a right-wing Twitter alternative run by a former Trump aide. Finchem’s comments were amplified by the Arizona Republican Party and its chair, Kelli Ward. Finchem even retweeted himself. On Wednesday night, Grid verified that Finchem’s campaign website was, indeed, hidden on search. Searches on Google for Finchem’s name, or the name of his website, failed to yield Finchem’s campaign site among the site’s returns. The only way to reach his website was to link directly from the URL. Given Finchem’s extensive activity on the internet at large, it would be expected that his campaign would be a top search result. And Google surfaced plenty of Finchem’s stop-the-steal rhetoric: his tweets, news coverage, C-SPAN archive and Facebook page, among other content. Grid confirmed that Finchem’s site was coded to explicitly direct Google and other search engines not to index it. A spokesperson for Google denied Finchem’s allegations. “The webmaster for this site has instructed Google and other search engines not to include the site’s homepage in our search results by using a ‘noindex’ directive,” the spokesman said in an email to Grid. “If a site wishes to appear in search results, they can remove the ‘noindex’ directive.” Archived copies of the site indicate the “noindex” code was inserted in Finchem’s site between mid-July and Aug. 1. Earlier snapshots of the site don’t include the command. In addition to criticizing Google’s search engine, Finchem also blames “Marxists” for his loss of followers on social media. CDT’s Adler found the whole scenario in keeping with Finchem’s politics. “Finchem has built his campaign on bogus claims of election corruption,” Adler said. “It’ s not too surprising that he would also make the bogus claim that his bogus claims are being censored.”