This week, we’re breaking down the Big Lie. So far, we’ve covered the years of voter-fraud activism that laid its foundation, attempts to stop the certification of the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 attack, & new voting-restriction bills. Today, let’s talk about sham election reviews.
While state legislators have worked to make it harder to access the ballot box, Trump and his supporters have been finding new ways to relitigate the results of the 2020 election, most notably with a sham “audit” of the results in Arizona.
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…
I: Arizona. Soon after the election, the Arizona Senate, led by Senate President Karen Fann, subpoenaed Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, for images of mail-in ballots, voting equipment, and other documents.
Records we later obtained showed that Fann admitted to having had “numerous conversations” with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani during this period, and had received a “personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”
americanoversight.org/how-the-arizon…
americanoversight.org/how-the-arizon…
Despite an independent audit showing that there had been no problem with the voting machines used in Maricopa County, the state Senate pushed ahead with its own “audit” of the results.
To conduct this operation, the Senate hired a little-known firm called Cyber Ninjas, which had no experience in conducting election reviews and is led by a man named Doug Logan who had publicly supported “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories.
While the Senate handed over $150,000 for this partisan ballot review, its organizers quickly started raising private funding in an effort coordinated in part by Christina Bobb, a reporter for the pro-Trump outlet One America News.
Cyber Ninjas, under public pressure, eventually released a list of its largest funders, a constellation of groups linked to prominent supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Bobb also raised money for state legislators from across the country to visit the “audit” and export its strategy to their home states.
In May, we sued the Arizona Senate to release records from the “audit,” including those in the possession of Cyber Ninjas. The Senate is continuing to fight our suit, but plenty is already known to cast serious doubt on any purported findings of the Senate’s contractors.
In July, we released a preliminary report on our findings based on the documents that had already been released to us, which included evidence of the political motivations behind the audit and of the involvement of conspiracy theorists.
americanoversight.org/how-the-arizon…
americanoversight.org/how-the-arizon…
Our Arizona litigation is ongoing, and you can see the latest updates here:
https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1438572540138508302?s=20
II: Wisconsin. As the Arizona Senate pursued its sham “audit” of its election results, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos announced that he would be hiring three retired police officers to investigate his state’s election results.
Vos later hired retired state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman to oversee the investigation, and the former cops stepped aside as Vos apparently caved to pressure to expand the investigation.
Like Arizona’s operation, Vos’s investigation has largely operated under a veil of secrecy. Under Wisconsin’s open records law, we have requested contract and communications about both the Vos investigation, as well as a separate investigation led by state Rep. Janel Brandtjen.
III: Other States. Trump allies across the country have been watching Arizona. Elected officials from at least eight states visited the Arizona “audit.” In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Trump ally, is attempting to replicate the Arizona Senate’s effort.
In Georgia, an outside activist is suing to examine ballots from Fulton County. Even in Washington state, where the presidential election wasn’t close, Republican state legislators are hunting for fraud.
The Arizona “audit” is the test case for others who want to undermine faith in elections and justify voter suppression. The stakes are high, and there must be transparency and accountability.
Read our full report breaking down the history of the Big Lie and its far-reaching impact here:
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…
If you want to read our in-depth Twitter threads about different aspects of the “Big Lie” from earlier this week, click the threads in the following tweets:
https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1437450139094769664?s=20
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