The MAGA/QAnon Cult Is Quite Insane: ‘Get Rid Of Voting Machines And Hand Count All Ballots’

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First of all, Arizona counties do not have enough resources appropriated by the state legislature to conduct elections. They are always being shortchanged. This is why counties accepted grants from civic groups in 2020 to cover their actual costs of running an election during a Covid pandemic.

This too was the subject of wild-eyed MAGA/QAnon conspiracy theories about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who donated more than $400 million to nonprofits that in turn distributed grants to state and local election officials. Private Donations Helped Pay For 2020 Elections. Arizona Republicans Say No More:

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The Arizona House approved HB 2569 last week in a party-line vote. The legislation would ban election officials at all levels of government — city, county and state — from receiving private funds to help pay for any aspect of election operations, including voter registration.

Fake GQP elector Rep. Jake Hoffman, the bill’s sponsor, said it’s a matter of election integrity. That means keeping elections free of influence or interference, he said.

Arizona spent its nearly $4.8 million grant on a statewide voter outreach program with a little over a month to go before Election Day.

Democratic Rep. Kelli Butler said “[It] sounds like we all came to an agreement that it is the duty of taxpayers to fund the election,” she said. “But the fact is, we aren’t doing that right now. And when we don’t have enough money to do that, I can’t blame them [election officials] in the last election for seeking the funds they needed to perform those critical functions and keep our elections safe.”

Opponents of bills like HB 2569 say unless the effort to block private grants is paired with additional government funding for elections, voters will suffer.

Secondly, hand counting paper ballots is (1) labor intensive, (2) mind-numbingly slow, and (3) more prone to human error.

Remember in 2018, Arizona Republicans were alleging voter fraud because it took a few weeks for the voting machines to count all of the ballots (actually, this delay was in certifying signatures on the large number of mail-in ballots turned in on election day). Republicans were hysterically alleging voter fraud because a few GQP candidates leading in a partial tally of the vote on Election night in the end lost the election after all the ballots were tallied. The Arizona GQP conducted its own “audit” of the 2018 election also. It concluded that Maricopa County’s Democratic recorder didn’t violate any laws during the 2018 general election and that two disputed policies he implemented didn’t affect the outcomes of any races. Nothingburger.

The Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” of just Maricopa County for only two races conducted by the QAnon conspiracy theorist Doug Logan aka Cyber Ninjas took over three months to count ballots, and was so chock full of errors that no one in their right mind takes it seriously. It has been thoroughly discredited and dismissed by election experts. Arizona ‘audit’: A multitude of unsubstantiated claims and no proof of fraud.

The hand counting of all ballots for all races in Arizona would be an unmitigated disaster (especially if election denier MAGA/QAnon election volunteers are permitted to handle ballots. This is not a job for people detached from reality and motivated by a desire to rig an election).

The key here is “people in their right mind.” Which brings me to QAnon cultist, election denier and Oath Keeper insurrectionist Sen. Wendy Rogers, the sponsor of a bill to hand count all paper ballots in Arizona. GOP-Led Arizona Senate Panel Votes to Hand-Count All Ballots:

Republican state senators on Monday advanced legislation that would require every ballot cast in Arizona’s elections to be counted by hand, with GOP proponents who embraced former President Donald Trump’s false narrative of massive voter fraud calling it a needed reform.

The proposal from Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, was approved by the Senate Government Committee Monday afternoon on a 4-3 vote with no Democratic support.

The measure is one of scores of election bills making their way through the Legislature this year.

Rogers said her proposal for an all-hand count tabulation was prompted by comments made by Doug Logan, the CEO of the firm the Arizona Senate hired to recount 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots last spring, Cyber Ninjas.

“This does away with the machines,” Rogers said. “When I interviewed cyber forensic expert Doug Logan … he told me that the biggest finding he has from the audit is that the more technology we use, the more chance there is to cheat.”

Let me stop you right there, wack job. Doug Logan in no way is a cyber forensic expert, no matter how much you want to convince yourself. He is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who had never conducted an election audit before in his life. This asshat clown had no idea what he was doing, and it was painfully obvious to those of us who have been involved in genuine election recounts of ballots over the years (since the 2000 recount in Florida).

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, said the proposal was simply unworkable.

“As we know, we cannot get enough people in many of our counties to conduct the limited hand count that happens post-election,” Marson told the panel. “I struggle to believe that we would have enough people to hand count the entire election and all of the different ballot styles associated with that election in any kind of timely fashion.”

But Rogers says she there would be no shortage of volunteers to count the ballots quickly, although she failed to mention there are dozens of races on each ballot. Statewide, 3.4 million ballots were cast in 2020.

QAnon Queen Sen. Kelly Townsend, the committee’s Republican chair, was shepherding more than a dozen election bills through her panel Monday afternoon, with plans to go into the evening. They included bills to ban the required use of “Sharpies” to mark ballots as she sought to address just one of the claims she said led Trump supporters to dispute the election results. [The bogus “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory rears its ugly head again. No truth to GOP claims that Sharpies are invalidating Arizona ballots. These QAnon conspiracy freaks just can’t let it go.]

With only a one-vote majority in the Senate and House, many of the more outlandish proposals are unlikely to make it into law. In addition to Rogers’ proposal to require paper ballots and banning machine counts, others would eliminate voting by mail, which is used by the vast majority of Arizona voters.

Republican Sen. Paul “Voucher Vulture” Boyer is one big roadblock.

“So I’m not voting to decertify (the 2020 election), I’m not voting for the 17 tests and the magic paper,” he told The Associated Press last week, the last a reference to a plan to add a host of ballot paper security measures. “I’m not voting to get rid of early voting. I’m not voting to prohibit all-mail ballots for schools, school elections. What else was out there?”

GOP House Speaker Rusty Bowers is another — he recently assigned a Republican House member’s plan to eliminate mail-in voting and require hand counts to be done in one day to 12 different committees.

In the Senate committee hearing on Monday, the three Democrats on the GOP-dominated panel mainly stayed silent as a parade of election bills were heard.

“It’s one of those days where you’re realizing that they’ve gone so far off the rails that it almost kind of defies giving it any more legitimacy than it already has by trying to comment,” Democratic Sen. Martin Quezada said in a brief interview during the panel’s dinner break. “You’re not going to persuade these folks, and these ideas are so crazy that it’s like it’s not even worth arguing against.”

The Arizona Mirror reports, Voting machines have been used in Arizona since 1881, but a GOP bill would bar them:

Voting would return to 19th Century methods — with their glacial pace and flawed accuracy -– and reduce voter access under legislation Republicans approved in a legislative committee that would ban machines from counting votes, critics said.

The proposal is rooted in the Big Lie, a belief that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Although there are various evidence-free theories purporting to explain how that happened, a prominent one is that ballot-counting machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

The idea has been tossed out of court for a lack of evidence, and a biased election review conducted last year by the Arizona Senate examined ballot tabulators in Maricopa County and found nothing to back up the claim.

Nonetheless, a state legislator who has built a nationwide political following by espousing widely debunked lies about the 2020 election says machines designed to quickly count ballots more accurately than humans are likelier to result in false results because of cheating.

“This is paper only ballots, this does away with the machines,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, said about her Senate Bill 1338.

* * *

Voting machines have been used in Arizona since 1881, some 30 years before statehood. Returning to hand counting elections would invariably lengthen the time it takes to announce election results and may even be logistically impossible. In 2020, there were close to four million registered voters statewide, and Marson said that number increases every year. She questioned the state’s ability to recruit enough manpower to count the ballots, especially under pressure from Arizonans who want to know the results quickly.

“We cannot get enough people in many of our counties to conduct the limited hand count that happens post-election. I struggle to believe that we would have enough people to hand count the entire election, and all of the different ballot styles associated with that election, in any kind of timely fashion,” she said.

Some ballots have several dozen contests on them. In addition to the federal and statewide races, they can include ballot propositions, city and county elections, school boards, water and fire districts, judges and more. Which races and contests are on which ballots depend on where a voter lives.

Rogers touted the willingness of residents in her district who would be prepared to help, and would travel across the state to do so.

“There is a hue and a cry in my district for free and fair elections,” she said.

Her fellow MAGA/QAnon election deniers should not be allowed to touch a ballot. Period.

Among the bill’s proponents was Teresa Bumguardner, who worked for the Senate’s “audit” and claimed that a return to simplicity was best. The “audit” itself took three months to hand-count 2.1 million ballots, and was plagued by inaccuracy. One review found it actually missed thousands of ballots. That review only counted votes for two contests on the ballots — president and U.S. Senate.

SB1338 also makes voting less accessible by forcing a return to precinct-level voting [costly to counties]. It would bar voting centers, which Republican lawmakers authorized in 2011 to make it easier for people to vote in person on Election Day. In precinct-only voting, voters can only cast a ballot at their neighborhood polling place; if they attempt to vote at another polling location, their ballots are not counted. Voting centers allow any voter in the county to cast a ballot. After a voter’s eligibility is verified, a ballot is printed on-site.

Maricopa County began using an all-voting center model in 2020, following the lead of rural counties like Yavapai, which were early adopters. Earlier this week, Pima County approved using voting centers in its upcoming elections.

Maricopa County currently has 748 voting precincts for more than 2.5 million registered voters, some larger than 10,000 voters.

Jodi Liggett, lobbyist for the League of Women Voters of Arizona, said that getting rid of voting centers would be detrimental for voters. [That’s the whole point of this GQP Jim Crow 2.o voter suppression.]

“Vote centers are convenient and effective, reducing confusion on Election Day,” she said, “Eliminating (them) harms rural and tribal communities.”

There are 22 tribes and 20 tribal reservations in Arizona, and many of them stretch across counties. The largest one is the Navajo Nation, which spans three counties, each one with different voting practices. Often, street addresses aren’t used in tribal or rural areas, but precinct voting requires them.

Vote centers are not only more inclusive, but they also increase voter turnout because of their convenience. Their cumulative nature reduces the number of locations needed and effectively lowers costs by requiring fewer employees to run.

The bill was approved by the Republican majority in the Senate Government Committee and awaits consideration by the full Senate.

Committee Chairwoman Qanon Queen Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, said that a return to the voting practices of “our parents” would improve the system.

“We’re just reverting back to the way they did it prior to all this technology and it was smaller precincts, and the precinct workers counted (the ballots) there,” she said.

WTF is this crazy woman talking about? A return to the voting practices of “our parents”? I’ve got news for you crazy woman, my parents voted on lever voting machines back in the state where I was born. How Americans Have Voted Through History: From Voices to Screens:

In the late 19th-century, Jacob H. Myers invented his lever-operated “Automatic Booth” voting machine, an engineering marvel that would come to dominate American elections from 1910 through 1980.

Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, has researched the history of voting machines and concludes that Myers’ groundbreaking contraption had more moving parts than any other machine of its day, including the automobile. These early voting machines weighed hundreds of pounds, cost thousands of dollars and would be installed in the corner of the local town hall for decades.

Voting on one of these lever machines was easy. Each candidate for each race had a small lever next to his or her name and Americans voted by pulling down the levers of their chosen candidates. If they wanted to vote along a single party line, they could pull one lever that automatically selected the Republican or Democratic candidates.

But inside the machine, the vote-counting process was incredibly complex, says Jones. There were 200 or more levers on the face of the machine, and behind each lever were mechanisms that prevented the vote from being counted until the final lever was pulled (in case a voter changed their mind). The straight party levers had to be linked to every candidate lever on the ticket and none of it required a single watt of electricity.

“The only power required was muscle power to pull down the small levers to vote for candidates and then more muscle power to move the great big lever that opened and closed the curtain,” says Jones.

Unbeknownst to most voters, the action of opening the curtain on the voting booth was what finally counted the votes and reset the machine for the next voter.

“These machines inspired extraordinary public confidence because of their sheer physicality,” says Jones, who says that Myers’ company, Automatic Voting Machines, dominated 80 percent of the market. “But behind the scenes, it’s not clear that confidence was justified.”

Lever machines were mechanical, and a single missing tooth on a gear was known to cause serious miscounts that were rarely caught by election officials. And Jones says that the machines could be rigged with something as innocuous as the tip of a graphite pencil.

Arizona had prohibited lever voting machines by the time I was old enough to vote because Republican legislators did not like the idea of “party line voting” – they wanted  to perpetuate the myth that voters actually give serious consideration to each race and each candidate, and force voters to manually vote for each of the candidates whom they support. This likely had the effect of drop off of voting for down ballot races, as we still see today.

Since the vast majority of voters vote party line on their ballot – I know this because I have reviewed thousands of ballots over the years – it would save a lot time and make voting quick and easy if Arizona bought back the “party line voting” option on voting machines. Just sayin’. The judicial retention ballot and ballot measures would likely still require voters to manually vote for each of the judges and ballot measures they support.





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