Ken Bennett’s ‘Concerns’ about Maricopa’s Administration of the 2020 Election Give Fuel to Conspiracies and Lies

In all of Bennett’s public testimony and statements about the election there is a commonality of concerns specifically related to the behavior, practices, and honesty of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors and the Maricopa County elections department:

• 1. Files were ‘deleted’ from the elections management server and not released to the Senate, but rather backed up, and the Board of Supervisors denied any files had been deleted, until making admissions to that effect before Congress.
  2. Common usernames and passwords were used by elections staff, rather than ones unique to each user, as required by law according to Bennett, “best security practices” according to Fann, and merely ‘flawed’ according to the Cyber Ninjas report summary.
  3. User activity logs are alleged to have been ‘intentionally rolled over’ and ‘fully cleared, according to the Cyber Ninjas report, and ‘churned’ according to Bennett. I’m not sure where Bennett got the pejorative term ‘churned’ from, but perhaps elsewhere in the Cyber Ninjas report.

Of course, none of these ‘concerns’ brings into question the result of the 2020 election – even the Cyber Ninjas themselves don’t allege that these ‘concerns’ could have affected the result of the election: they admit that the best evidence are the physical ballots, which clearly and definitively confirm the official vote count.

These ‘concerns’ are simply irrelevant to the result of the 2020 Arizona election. No one, not Bennett, and not the Cyber Ninjas, are alleging otherwise – well, except maybe Trump and his lickspittles… Yet there is a persistent and sly elision by many seeking to undermine the 2020 election result that these ‘concerns’ somehow justify continued skepticism, or even outright denial, of the legitimate result of the Arizona election, and thus President Biden’s election.

How serious are these ‘concerns’, really? Are they being presented in a way that intentionally encourages continuing suspicion among those already inclined to be suspicious of the election result? I surmise that this is exactly what is being done, and I confronted Bennett about that.

I drilled down on some of those particular concerns, which Cyber Ninjas and Fann, and Rep. Andy Biggs have made sound so ominous and suspicious, and Bennett has publically also ‘related’, and I find that there is far less to these ‘concerns’ than the election deniers like Trump, Lake, Finchem, and others want to make them seem.

Ed: I have linked here an AI-generated transcript of our conversation as a Google Doc, as a transcript of a 10 minute conversation is rather too long to include in the body of this post.

This may seem a pedantic point, but these minor and deliberately framed ‘concerns’ continue fan conspiracy thinking.

For instance, the congressional hearing Bennett testified at was also attended by Arizona’s Rep. Andy Biggs, who is a prominent proponent of the #BigLie that the AZ election (in which he himself was elected on the very same ballots, BTW) was fraudulent, manipulated, corrupted, or somehow stolen from Trump.

Here is Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona infamously denying that we can even know who won the Presidential election because of ‘irregularities’ in the Maricopa elections procedures. This perfidy will be Biggs’ legacy forever:

Purposeful, or not, Bennett’s repetition of these ‘concerns’ and often even the pejorative framing by Cyber Ninjas, Fann, and others, provides the basis for disinformation and outright election denial that we see here from Andy Biggs, Kari Lake, Mark Finchem, and others.

By failing to contextualize and explain that these ‘concerns’ are utterly irrelevant to the outcome of the 2020 election, Bennett allows those lies to flourish. I believe that Bennett is earnestly trying to convey that these ‘concerns’ are merely reasons to improve the elections procedures in Arizona, but the way he simply parrots the talking points and language of those who DO aim to subtly undermine the 2020 election undercuts that innocent intent and allows his reputation to be used propagandistically to spread disinformation and lies.

Bennett is not, of course, personally responsible for the reprehensible behavior and lies of Biggs, and Trump’s utterly baseless claim that audit proved he won Arizona, but Bennett must recognize his role in lending his credibility to the intimations of wrong-doing by Maricopa County elections workers and officials that allow these kinds of hateful, divisive, and dangerous lies to flourish. While Bennett may intend to merely point out there is a little smoke in the gears of the elections of Maricopa that we might need to address, demagogues and propagandists in his faction point to that smoke and scream that it means our democratic system of elections is on fire, and must be demolished to put out the flames.

Bennett has allowed his credibility to be exploited to amplify and give credence to the very flimsy aspersions being cast upon the conduct of Maricopa elections professionals and officials framed nefariously by the Cyber Ninjas and other conspiracy-mongers. I don’t think he realizes how vital his role can be in either cutting off the oxygen to the lies and smothering them, or giving them the air they need to spread and consume our democracy.

Vile demagogues like Biggs, Lake, Finchem, and Trump himself are using Bennett shamelessly to give their baseless lies credibility. He can’t simply throw up his hands and disclaim responsibility; he must denounce the lies head-on, or he is complicit in those lies and malign attacks on our democratic elections. I don’t believe Bennett would wish to see those attacks and lies continue, but I don’t think he sees that it is his responsibility to help stop them.