The Arizona Republic: End the Arizona Senate’s Sham Election Audit Now

The Arizona Republic fka The Arizona Republican – and boy howdy have resident GQP apologist Robert Robb and partisan editor Phil Boas been doing their best to turn back the clock to The Arizona Republican lately – nevertheless editorialized on Thursday, Arizona’s GOP Senate is abusing its authority. It must end this election ‘audit’ now:

Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have set aside dollars, hired consultants, procured the hardware and software to conduct what they call “an audit” of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County.

What they don’t have is the moral authority to make it credible.

Their conduct post-election has been so nakedly partisan that whatever their audit finds, its results will not be believed. They’ll be mocked and derided.

State Senate Republicans insist they are not trying to reverse the election, but are rather trying to build greater trust in the system.

But how can anyone trust them?

Senate has repeatedly undermined trust

They have overreached from the beginning, abusing their subpoena power to try to criminalize a dispute with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

County officials resisted their demands to hand over county tabulating machines and ballots. The system had already gone through rigorous testing, established by election law.

And even the Republican governor of Arizona and the Democrat secretary of state affirmed the integrity of the election.

Still Senate Republicans pressed on with their Trump fantasy of stolen votes. They did it even as election officials and political leaders and judges all across this country rebuffed similar challenges.

Rather than building trust, this audit undermines it:

• • • It gives the major contract to Cyber Ninjas, a Florida firm that has virtually no experience auditing elections.
    • Cyber Ninjas’ CEO is an unapologetic supporter of Donald Trump’s election conspiracy theories.
    • The Senate is not providing the necessary funding or time to do a legitimate review of the votes.
    • Their plan includes sending people door-to-door to test the validity of irregular voter registration forms. Interrogating voters at their doorstep is not what you call a confidence builder.

There are still Republicans in this state who understand the folly of what is happening and the damage it will do, not only to our elections and the State of Arizona but to the Republican Party [what the editors are actually concerned about.]

They need to work more aggressively behind the scenes to bring this to a stop.

This audit is partisan and ideological in the extreme. It is toxic. And its destination is certain failure.

Why would the leaders and people of this state waste another dollar on a project that has already lost all credibility?

This needs to end.

The editors really, really, really want to endorse Republicans for office next year, as they have always done, but the insurrectionist Sedition Caucus who have taken the GQP down the MAGA/QAnon rabbit hole of Donald Trump’s “stolen election” conspiracy theory are making it difficult for them to justify supporting such dangerously deranged Republicans for office next year.

The editors ignore the fact that years of enabling and promoting these very same dangerously deranged Republicans in the pages of The Republic makes them complicit (evil eye to you, Robert Robb). They share much the blame for the monster that they helped to create.

The only remedy is to remove every one of these Seditious Republicans from office next year en masse.