A member of the ad-hoc panel of QAnon conspiracy cultists that heard 10 hours of unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud at a forum for Rudy Giluliani’s “elite strike force team” of bumbling lawyers on Monday now wants Arizona’s attorney general to investigate. Arizona GOP lawmaker asks attorney general to investigate election allegations:
State Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, sent Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich a link Tuesday to the YouTube video of the unofficial hearing and asked that he “investigate each claim made” by a parade of witnesses.
Townsend lamented that she has been told none of the allegations forwarded to the Attorney General’s Office have been acted upon because there’s no proof something illegal occurred.
These range from people who contend they saw something amiss in processing ballots, to statistical contentions there is no way President Trump could have lost Arizona and Democrat Joe Biden could have gotten as many votes as the official count says.
Townsend wants some response from Brnovich in the next 24 to 48 hours.
“I think where there’s smoke you have to go find the fire,” she said. “We provided them smoke. And they need to go and find the fire.”
Translation: “We don’t have any credible evidence, so please use the resources of your office to find us some!”
Here’s the truly offensive part: Kelly Townsend currently chairs the House Committee on Elections. It doesn’t get any better in January. The House Government & Elections Committee will be chaird by John Kavanagh.
Attorney General Brnovich, please don’t waste your time and resources on this QAnon cultist’s conspiracy theories.
Last week the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued this statement:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
On Monday, this statement was endorsed by Donald Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General, William Barr. Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud:
Disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr declared the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Barr’s comments, in an interview Tuesday with the The Associated Press, contradict the concerted effort by Trump, his boss, to subvert the results of last month’s voting and block President-elect Joe Biden from taking his place in the White House.
And remember, this is coming from the same Trump sycophant who before the election “had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans feared going to polls and instead chose to vote by mail.”
On Monday, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, along with Governor Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs all certified the vote in Arizona after all 15 counties had certified the vote after passing logic & accuracy testing, and in the largest counties comprising the vast majority of the vote in Arizona, passing a hand count partial audit of the ballots. No abnormalities were noted.
Townsend’s conspiracy theory essentially is that Arizona’s elected leaders, including you Attorney General, all falsely certified the vote in violation of your constitutional duties. Are you going to take this insult from this tinfoil hat nut? Tell Kelly Townsend to go pound sand.
Townsend said she’s prepared to accept the conclusion of the Attorney General’s Office if investigators look into the complaints and find there are no violations.
Don’t believe her. Conspiracy theorists always just invent another conspiracy theory.
[I]t might be difficult for any investigator to use what came out of [Giuliani’s] Monday forum as basis for an investigation or a source of proof.
None of the Arizonans who spoke were under oath. And all the questioning came either from lawmakers like Townsend, who said they are already convinced there was fraud in the just-completed election, or from presidential attorney Rudolph Giuliani.
Some of the witnesses were brought to Arizona by Giuliani and his team, who have been going from state to state in a bid to convince lawmakers they should overturn the reported popular vote.
In Arizona, they want the Legislature to declare Biden’s win — officially certified Monday by top elected officials of both parties — and instead select electors who would cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for President Trump.
Townsend made reference to that possibility, citing a provision of the U.S. Constitution. “It is our duty to select electors for the presidential election,” she wrote to Brnovich. “And I am not confident that fraud did not exist in the 2020 general election.”
Oh Geezus. Let me explain this to you tinfoil hat nuts one more time:
The U.S. Constitution gives the Legislature the job of deciding how the state’s presidential electors will be chosen.
The Arizona Legislature has tasked the voters with choosing those electors on Election Day.
A “faithless elector” provision in state law requires the electors to cast their votes for the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in the state.
Senate Republicans asked lawyers at the Legislature this month to issue an opinion on the issue. The response: The Legislature would have to change these laws to change how presidential electors are appointed.
And even if they did, the opinion said, the changes could not apply to this election because voters have already chosen the electors at the ballot box.
The “faithless elector” provision, by the way, was one sponsored by Republicans in 2017.
In other words, if the Arizona legislature wanted to change the law, it had to do it before the election. It cannot wait until after the election to see the results, and only then post hoc try to change the law if they are dissatisfied with the outcome of the election.
This is anti-democratic and un-American authoritarianism, pure and simple.
The best response to Trump’s election fraud nonsense came on Monday from Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, who had strong words for President Trump and other Republican leaders who have attacked Georgia’s election system in recent weeks after reports of harassment and death threats against officials overseeing the state’s recount.
Let’s hope that this will be the equivalent of the Joseph Welch moment confronting Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy soon faded into ignominy and drank himself into an early grave.
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The Orange Game Show Host is fundraising off this.
And he gets to keep most of the 170,000,000.00 they raised so far for his personal use if he so chooses.
His donors need to read the fine print.
People like Townsend are helping the failed New York condo salesman grift his cult members.
Townsend is also trying to cancel my vote, so she can take a nice heavy hammer and a big handful of sand and pound hard.