Some candidates think phony Trump fraud claims are key to winning midterms

Trump himself is scheduled to visit Arizona this Saturday, where he looks to claim, yet again, that the Arizona audit will be the first domino in showing fraud in a string of states that Biden narrowly won, including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In this narrative, truth doesn’t merely take a back seat. It gets tossed to the side of the road.

Take last week’s GOP briefing at Arizona’s state capitol, where Doug Logan, lead contractor on the review of ballots in Maricopa County, said “we have 74,243 mail-in-ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent,” and 11,326 people whom he said were not on the Nov. 7 voter rolls but showed up on the final roll of voters on Dec. 4.

But that didn’t matter. Within minutes, and in the week since, Donald Trump and a slew of GOP election conspiracists trumpeted these supposed findings across social media as “proof” the election was stolen. And candidates touting their fealty to Trump were quick to tweet, re-tweet or otherwise post Logan’s debunked claims and call for more audits.

Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, (center) now running for a US Senate seat, poses with Arizona state senators Wendy Rogers and Sonny Borrelli before his June 12 tour of the Arizona Senate’s audit site.

From the start, with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann hiring the Cyber Ninjas firm, a little-known firm inexperienced in election audits, run by a man who’d repeated wild conspiratorial fraud claims; to the review being funded with great secrecy by private, likely partisan sources; through the company initially handing auditors blue pens until a reporter pointed out they could be used to change how ballots are read; to, more recently, contractors sending reams of vote data off to a mysterious cabin in Montana, in the latest portion of the audit, the Arizona vote review has been fraught.

There could scarcely be a deeper canyon than the one between how election experts see the audit and how Trump-backing GOP candidates describe it.

“Was this deliberate from day one for fundraising?” asked Harri Hursti, founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, and a data-security expert who recently completed a conventional election audit in New Hampshire, about the Arizona vote review. “This whole thing is theater … it’s all smoke and mirrors and theater.” The New Hampshire audit, by contrast, found that a borrowed folding machine in the town of Windham caused 400 ballots to be improperly counted, but that there was “no basis to believe that the miscounts found in Windham indicate a pattern of partisan bias or a failed election.”

“If you are a Republican who has concerns about this election, you shouldn’t trust the outcome of this review in Arizona,” Grayson told CNN.

“Routine audits of vote counts are important,” said Mark Lindeman, acting co-director of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election-integrity nonprofit that earlier this year worked with Georgia on a full hand count of its vote and with Pennsylvania on a risk-limiting election audit. Both indicated that the original results were substantially accurate.

But in Arizona, he said, “The problem seems to be that Trump lost, and that’s what they’re trying to fix; but that’s not what audits do.” He called the procedures Cyber Ninjas and the other subcontractors in Arizona are following bizarre, adding, “It’s a process that can only raise more questions, muddy the waters … None of it makes much sense, except as a way to increase doubt.”

But many of the GOP candidates and lawmakers visiting Arizona, who have eagerly fomented lies about the 2020 vote, and embraced vicious and radical rhetoric about those who disagree with them, dismiss such criticisms.

“I don’t care what a GOP board says; you have a lot of RINOs occupying positions they should not be in,” said Oklahoma’s Lahmeyer, using the term for “Republicans in name only.” Lahmeyer, who touts his endorsement from disgraced former Gen. Michael Flynn, and hopes to unseat GOP Sen. James Lankford in 2022, termed Lankford “a traitor,” for voting on Jan. 6 to certify President Biden’s victory. As of June 30, Lahmeyer reported raising just more than $250,000 to the Federal Election Commission. Lankford’s FEC reports show he’d raised $2.3 million as of that date.

Jones, the former Georgia lawmaker, has called Gov. Kemp “a traitor” for rejecting election fraud claims. Asked about his visit to the Arizona audit and his claims of fraud in Georgia, Jones said, “It has helped my campaign. From day one, I’ve talked about things I described as violation of the Constitution, the procedures followed in counting absentee ballots.” His fundraising website specifically asks for contributions to “ensure that Georgia’s elections are never stolen by Democrats again.”

Chase, the Virginia lawmaker, said she plans to push for an audit in Virginia when its legislature goes into session in August. “I do believe there were irregularities and an organized effort by Democrats to steal the election from President Trump, and thousands of votes flipped. There needs to be a forensic audit in every state,” she said.

And in Arizona, where term-limited Gov. Doug Ducey won’t be running for reelection, at least two GOP candidates for governor have echoed on social media Logan’s debunked claims about election problems.

Lindeman, of Verified Voting, sighed during a discussion of such claims, and said that while election audits can always be improved, “they were better in 2020 than they have ever been.”

“There is no rational basis for the notion that something terrible happened in November 2020 and we have to keep investigating and investigating until we find it,” he said, adding that, “what’s been lost is any shared national commitment to look for facts.”