Some of Ken Bennett’s Suggestions for Improvements to AZ Election Audit Laws Are Sensible and Non-Partisan Reforms

Democrats should strongly support two of Bennett’s suggested legislative reforms: publishing the cast vote record and sequential ballot images shortly following every election.

Ed.: This article is part of a series regarding Ken Bennett’s role and public statements about the #AZFraudit, please consider reading the others: “Bennett’s Bottom Line: No Evidence Supports Trump’s Lie That He Won AZ“; “Ken Bennett’s ‘Concerns’ about Maricopa’s Administration of the 2020 Election Give Fuel to Conspiracies and Lies“; and “Does Ken Bennett Support Look Ahead Arizona’s Aims and Methods?”

I absolutely deplore the fallaciously predicated, questionable legality, and wholly partisan manner in which Senate President Fann launched the #AZFraudit.

I was shocked and sickened by the clownishly corrupt selection of the Cyber Ninjas as the contract vendor, an organization thoroughly unqualified for the job – except, of course, for their CEO having spread baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, that is – to conduct this ad hoc farce after two legally authorized recounts and the statutorily authorized audit had already found the election was accurate, secure and reliable.

I was fascinated and sickened by the moronic antics, nakedly corrupt and secretive procedures adopted by the Cyber Ninjas, and the desperate attempts to exclude the media and impartial observers from the fraudit process.

I found the entire process humiliating to our state, destructive to the rule of law, and undermining of the public’s trust and confidence in our professionalized, bi-partisan election officials and workers, denigrating to the carefully constructed checks and balances of our democratic elections procedures which are required to make democracy work as a peaceful method of allocating government power.

In short, I deplore and denounce and utterly despise everything about what has happened in this fraudit over the past 10, or so, months. It should NEVER, EVER be allowed to happen again, or in any other state.

That said, perhaps there could be a diamond hidden in this noxious turd.

If you listen carefully, suspend judgment about the shit-show we all have been forced to watch, and only consider the objective merits of Bennett’s suggestions for improvements to Arizona law about how to actually improve the conduct a legally authorized audit of an election under rules and procedures determined in advance of any election, with no regard to the partisan result of said election, there is merit to some of it.

In fact, some of the suggestions are the exact suggestions that the Democratic party and liberal elections integrity experts and activists (including myself) were making almost 20 years ago when the current elections audit statute was first passed. Many of those suggestions were considered far too radical by the Republican Party back then; perhaps they are listening now?

Here is Bennett outlining his suggestions for how to improve the existing audit process:

You will note that Bennett credits some of these ideas to John Brakey, with whom I, and others in the community interested in election integrity, worked closely when the Democratic Party and liberal activists were suing Pima County to get access to the underlying tech and details of how elections were being administered in the early 2000’s.

The statutory process of hand count audit of elections under now-existing Arizona law was something of a very deep compromise, prompted, in part, by those activist lawsuits. We got as much as we could, but it admittedly was only a very small portion of the loaf we sought. Crumbs, in fact.

What resulted was a process of very limited hand count audits in randomly selected races of a sufficient number of ballots to allow a statistical analysis to see if the expected result would fall within an specified interval of confidence of the official count. If not, then the random selection is doubled and compared again. If it continues to fall outside the expected confidence interval, the random hand audit continues to expand. If it gets to every precinct in a jurisdiction, a special master appointed by the court gets to!… review the software source code.

Beyond that… well… no one really knows what would happen beyond the special master reporting to the AZ Secretary of State, who is only empowered by the statute to consider whether that software should continue to be certified for use in the state. That’s it. It says nothing about what happens to the anomalous race or races. I think the official machine count, is still the official election result, despite statistical evidence that the result may not be correct. If any election lawyers or professionals understand what might happen beyond this point, please enlighten me. The law is… not great. Needless to say, it’s never been stress tested by an actual statistical anomaly in the sample of sufficient scope and persistence to invoke the muddier parts of the law.

Bennett is suggesting we actually enact into statute much of the rest of that loaf we wanted. If his best suggestions were included in the existing statute for election audit procedures, it would actually be a vast improvement of Arizona’s elections. I would also suggest that the existing statistical hand count audit scheme needs revisiting, strengthening, and clarification.

Here’s an AI generated transcript of what Bennett suggested, which I have corrected, thus any errors are my own:

Bennett: So in my opinion, the most important thing I learned is that we need to be able to audit elections within 10 days, not 10 months. And I have kind of concluded that, um, with the help of many others, uh, that three things should be released within about 10 days of the election to accomplish three things, transparency, trackability, and public verification.

I get that from my good friend, John [Brakey]. John’s organization, elections should be transparent. They should be trackable and they should be publicly verified. Here’s the three things that I, for example, would release within 10 days or require the county’s release within 10 days after elections, they should release the cast vote records.

The cast vote record is a huge spreadsheet. And each row of the spreadsheet is each ballot. You don’t know whose vote they are, but the first ballot, they counted as row number one and the 1000th ballot is row 1000. And on and on, you can imagine Maricopa county’s cast vote record is really big,  2,089,563 people voted so that spreadsheet’s got 2,089,563 rows.

The columns on that cast vote record are the choices that the voters have in every race on the ballot. Maybe Trump’s in column G and Biden in column H, or whatever… for all of the races. Maricopa County had 800, nearly 800 columns in that spreadsheet. So we’re talking about a spreadsheet that has 2.1 million rows and 800 columns, but it represents what the election management system counted as far as the votes on every ballot.

So that’s the first thing that they should really do.

The second thing that should be released is the images of the ballots. You don’t know whose ballots they are, but the images of the ballots, the backup, the image of ballot 1000, the votes on that ballot should correspond with the votes reported in the cast vote record [on row 1000], and if campaigns or county parties or state parties, or the press, or the media or a citizens group, or whoever wanted to make sure that those matched up you should be able to do with the cast vote record and the images the ballots that align with that record.

Two of the suggestions Bennett makes, are actually quite good and in-line with the sort of integrity-building suggestions that elections experts have been making for years.

• Immediate (within 10 days of the election) publication of the cast vote record document recording the raw data read from every ballot.
• Immediate (again, within 10 days) publication of the sequential ballot images, so that the actual ballots can be compared to the cast vote record.

These are pretty much exactly the measures the Democratic Party sought years ago to improve public confidence in our elections. And they would work. They would allow everyone to actually see the nuts and bolts of every vote cast and counted. We lost that old battle because Republicans thought these measures would be too expensive, and too insecure: those excuses were barely plausible then, they are ridiculous now.

Democrats should enthusiastically support these two improvements to improve the transparency and confidence in the integrity of our elections.

Now, there are also some incredibly bad ideas floating around as well; a result, I presume, of Republicans’ desire to purge and suppress voters they do not approve of, and who don’t vote the way Republicans approve.

Bennett’s third suggestion was to publish the eligible voter list before the election, including personally identifiable information, and publish the list of eligible voters who actually voted after the election.

This is simply an open invitation for bad actors to engage in voter intimidation before an election and retaliation and reprisal after.

The legal authorities tasked with administrating and enforcing our election laws already have access to this potentially sensitive information to do their jobs. There is NO benefit to making this information publically available to everyone, except to satisfy some paranoiacs and bigots, who don’t like that some of their fellow citizens are eligible to vote and, in fact, exercise that right.

There is no legitimate auditing purpose for publishing this information; it can ONLY be abused by those with ill intent.

Finally, another suggestion I’ve heard from some on the right (such as Mr. Matt “Please, buy me a yacht, suckers” Braynard of Look Ahead America, and the seditious, election denier-in-chief, Rep. Mark Finchem, who is currently running for AZ SecState while claiming with zero evidence the 2020 AZ election was stolen, and consequently has The Loser-in-Chief’s endorsement) of somehow making ballots traceable back to an individual voter, completely ignores the hard-won lessons that led America to universally adopt the secret ballot in the first place.

To suggest that this ability will not be abused by those in power is absurd, naive, ahistorical, and simply wicked. Whether it be some barcode, a watermark, an RFID chip, or a biometric marker such as an encrypted fingerprint, they all come down to destroying the privacy of conscience that every American enjoys when they cast their ballots, free of fear, or hope of favor. These policies are dangerous and should not even be entertained by reasonable people.

We do have a rare moment in which the integrity of our elections is of vital concern to both parties. We could actually achieve a real advance in the openness, security, integrity, and the ability to fairly and publically audit our elections if we put aside the conspiracies, lies, and attempts to gain partisan advantage through the administration of our elections.

We can, and should, adopt those sensible audit reforms that experts have been suggesting to deaf ears for decades now: quick publication of the raw election data in the form of the cast vote record and the corresponding sequential ballot images.

And maybe we could figure out a better, more clear, statutorily established way to do hand-count audits while we’re at it? The current system is meh. It could be improved and expanded and given a more certain system of resolving the conflicting results in the courts if the hand count anomolies versus the machine count persist during an audit.

Oh, and make it a crime for anyone – even the Senate – to create a travesty of law and election integrity like the Sentate/Cyber Ninjas’ ad hoc, partisan #AZFraudit ever again! There was no pre-existing authority or guidance for the conduct of the Cyber Ninjas #AZFraudit, and it was an utter disaster for Arizona’s image and confidence in our elections systems. Such a propagandistic show-trial audit using our actual ballots by an unqualified and partisan-motivated vendor ought to be a criminal act.

Just imagine for a moment, my Republican friends: Democrats take the AZ Lege and Governorship in ’22 and ’24, Trump runs again for President and wins Arizona, but the Democrats repeat this travesty using their own partisan, hand-picked vendor whose CEO is claiming Trump stole the election? Does anyone really want that outcome? I certainly don’t.