This is straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook – if my candidate wins, it’s a glorious victory; if my opponent wins, the election must be rigged and a fraud. This is Donald Trump’s MAGA/QAnon Big Lie, fully embraced by “Krazy Kari” Lake. This extremist logic leads to violence to settle elections (authoritarianism), as we saw with the MAGA/QAnon violent seditious insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Business Insider reports, An Arizona election official went into hiding over threats as Trump-backed Kari Lake refuses to concede:
A top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County went into hiding on Sunday due to security concerns in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections.
Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates (above photo) confirmed to the local Fox affiliate KSAZ-TV that he moved to an “undisclosed location” with a security detail from the sheriff’s office. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is the state’s most populous, with more than 4.4 million residents.
Gates, a lifelong Republican, is one of the leaders of the Maricopa County Elections Department and has been a staunch defender of the county’s elections.
He has rejected the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and has since become the target of violent threats and intimidation by right-wing extremists and attacks by members of his own party after President Joe Biden’s Arizona win in 2020.
Issues at polling locations in Maricopa County on November 8 have fueled additional outcry from other conservatives, especially failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and her supporters.
Lake, who was endorsed by Trump, lost the election to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, but has since refused to concede, instead casting doubt on the election process and promising to assemble a legal team.
Lake cited long lines at the polls and issues with ballot printers at some polling locations in Maricopa County, arguing the issues made it so some people were unable to vote.
The Associated Press reported about 17,000 ballots were unable to be scanned at some sites but were instead collected and counted by different machines at the county’s main elections office. Those ballots were collected in what was called “box three.”
County officials said every ballot cast was counted and that voters had the option to visit any polling place, which included some without long lines. Gates also partially blamed the long lines on Republicans and said they scared GOP voters away from placing ballots in “box three” to be counted at election headquarters.
“This team, we have accepted our responsibility in this,” Gates said on November 14, according to AP. “But I’m not willing to accept responsibility for issues that were caused by others. And it is clear to me that those lines were longer because leaders in one political party were spreading misinformation.”
Arizona’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich, on Saturday wrote a letter requesting a report from Maricopa County on the problems with the printers and other issues.
I would suggest that death threats and intimidation of election officials is exactly the kind of “election integrity” issue that the Attorney General’s crack Election Integrity Unit (EIU) should be investigating, but instead the partisan hack attorney who leads this unit, Jennifer Wright, is a lawyer who co-chaired Verify the Vote Arizona and worked closely with True the Vote, and is providing fuel for election denialism.
Our partisan hack attorney general is corrupt and a disgrace to his office, and should never be allowed to practice law again.
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Underlining just how wacko and biased Jennifer Wright is, True the Vote was behind the financing of ‘2000 Mules’. This person should be nowhere near election issues; she should be in a looney bin. AG Brnovich is once again pandering to the denialists whilst trying to appear neutral. I’ll charitably attribute his behavior to not wanting death threats from Trump’s #MAGATerrorists, but I suspect that his decisions are more calculated and less defensive than that.