Zombie ‘Big Lie’ Election Denier Bill Raised From The Dead By QAnon Queen Sen. Kelly Townsend

House Speaker Rusty Bowers thought he was oh so clever by assigning the MAGA/QAnon Big Lie election denier bill from Rep. John Filmore to all twelve standing committees in the House. That spells certain death fora bill actually advancing. He may still be right in the end. He is Speaker after all.

But that doesn’t stop the QAnon Queen election denier, Sen. Kelly Townsend, from taking up Filmore’s Big Lie election denier bill in the Senate, where election denier Senate president Karen Fann made Townsend chair of the Senate Government Committee (a crime against democracy). This zombie bill is back from the dead in the QAnon Queen’s committee on Monday.

Howard Fischer reports, Bill seeks to end early voting, require hand count of ballots in Arizona:

A Republican lawmaker is finally going to get a chance to try to sell colleagues on his idea of killing early voting and requiring all ballots to be hand-counted.

Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, agreed to allow Rep. John Fillmore, also a Republican from Apache Junction, to use a procedural maneuver to put the idea up for a vote Monday in the Senate Government Committee, which she chairs.

It is identical to a bill he introduced [in the House] earlier this year.

But Fillmore never got a hearing after House Speaker Rusty Bowers, R-Mesa, put the kibosh on the whole idea by assigning his bill to an unprecedented 12 committees instead of the normal one or two. That assured no way for it to move forward.

“I think he didn’t get a fair shake in the House,” [the QAnon Queen election denier] Townsend told Capitol Media Services. “So I’ll let him have it heard in the Senate.”

The procedure being used bypasses the need for any House hearings. That’s because it’s being attached to an unrelated measure that already has been approved there.

And if Fillmore can get it through the Senate, then it would need only ratification by the full House, without any need for House committee hearings.

Of course, that assumes it gets that far.

“I don’t know that it goes any further than the committee,” Townsend said.

But it does provide the opportunity for Fillmore to publicly argue — and get a roll-call vote from the Republican-dominated committee — why he believes the way voting and counting is done now should be scrapped.

It’s starts with the hand count that, according to what is now HB 2289, would need to be completed within 24 hours. [This is quite literally impossible, and detached from reality.]

There are a lot of ballots. In 2020, more than 3.4 million were cast.

But Fillmore said that doesn’t make the task — and the deadline — impossible. [He is certifiablly nuts.]

The measure spells out that no voting precinct could have more than 1,500 registered voters. And while turnout this past year was unusually high, about 80%, Fillmore figures that most elections from now on will result in only about 60% of registered voters making their way to the polls.

He figures [he figures wrong] that the eight or more poll workers could divide up the ballots and easily conduct the hand count whatever is cast there, on site, once the polls close. And Fillmore said they can do it within 24 hours, no matter how many races are to be decided.

What makes him think that counting by hand is more accurate than running the ballots through tabulating machines?

“It’s not that it’s necessarily more accurate,” Fillmore told Capitol Media Services.

“It’s just that the trust is given more to the hand count than electronic means,” he said. “It’s the integrity of the hand count that’s greater in my opinion.”

He is, of course, full of shit. This MAGA/QAnon election denier believes the Big Lie that the state of Georgia was stolen, even after three counts of the ballots including a hand count of ballots, which took the better part of a week, not 24 hours, to complete. Georgia hand tally of votes is complete, affirms Biden lead:

A hand tally of ballots cast in Georgia for the presidential race has been completed, and it affirms Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump, according to results released Thursday by the secretary of state’s office.

The Associated Press declared Biden the winner of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes on Thursday, after the hand count confirmed the former vice president leads Trump by roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million counted.

The complete hand recount stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and wasn’t in response to any suspected problems with the state’s results or an official recount request. The secretary of state’s office has until Friday at 5 p.m. to certify the election results. The results that will be certified are the totals certified by the counties, not those resulting from the audit, elections officials have said.

[No] individual county showed a variation in margin larger than 0.73%, and the variation in margin in 103 of the state’s 159 counties was less than 0.05%, a memo released with the results says.

“Every single vote was touched by a human audit team and counted,” said Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system for the secretary of state’s office. “Obviously, the audit confirms the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the presidential contest in the state of Georgia.”

Put simply, he believes people are more likely to trust a tally done by a human being than one by a machine. [He means, of course, MAGA/QAnon cult members who believe in the Big Lie.]

Of course, Fillmore’s formula of having each election worker being able to count perhaps 120 ballots is based on the premise that each individual will not make a mistake, whether by accident or intentionally. That’s because the legislation provides for no separate verification or second look.

That possibility of human error is why the hand count in the audit ordered by Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, despite all of the criticism, actually made sure that each ballot was reviewed by three people. But Fillmore said that does not dissuade him from his plan to have each election worker count and see only his or her stack of ballots.

“That might have been the [fraudit],” Fillmore said.

“We’re not doing the [fraudit],” he continued. “We’re doing a hand count in the precinct in which the person is registered.”

And Fillmore said the people doing the counting would have no reason to fudge the results of the votes of their friends and neighbors.

Are you fucking kidding me? The MAGA/QAnon cult is all about rigging elections to ensure that only they can win elections in perpetuity.

The idea of an in-precinct hand count of all ballots, in turn, leads to the other half of the plan: Eliminate virtually all early ballots that would have to be tallied at a central location.

[Early voting] has proven widely popular, with close to 90% of people in the 2020 general election voting with an early ballot. But it also has become the target of those who contend, starting with former President Trump, that it was rigged, or so full of errors as to make the result unreliable and require overturning the results that gave Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to President Biden.

Instead, Fillmore proposes to limit the ability to cast what his legislation calls an “absentee ballot” to only a select few: those who plan to be out of state on Election Day, people physically unable to go to the polls because of being hospitalized or in a nursing home, those with a “visual impairment,” and those in the military who, under federal law, are permitted to vote by mail.

That is even more restrictive than the law was in 1991 when the legislature approved no-excuse early voting.

Before that, individuals could get an absentee ballot just because they expected to be away from their home voting precincts on Election Day. There also were ballots for those who were physically unable to go to the polls, for people 65 and older, and if the polling place was at least 15 road miles from the voter’s home.

Fillmore, for his part, said he is happy with the more limited set of restrictions in his bill.

Take the issue of being away from the precinct.

Fillmore said that affects pretty much everyone who is going to work. But he said that’s no excuse, as state law requires employers to provide at least three hours of time off to go vote. [Never enforced, and you can be in line for over 12 hours, I’ve seen this in other places.]

Nor does Fillmore believe that even those who will be out of county should be automatically entitled to an absentee ballot.

“Quite frankly, out of how many millions that we have, how many people are going to say, ‘Well, I’ll be out of the county that day’?” he said.

Fillmore said if he can get the bill out of committee it becomes a starting point for lawmakers to have a larger discussion on what kind of voting system Arizona should have.

“To me, the system now is broken,” he said. “So let’s take a starting point and go back to the basics.”

This is the guy who wants to turn back the clock over 60 years, you know, bwfore civil rights and voting rights. “We should have voting, in my opinion, in person, one day on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day,” Fillmore said in support of his bill. “We need to get back to 1958-style voting.” An Arizona Republican just unveiled the most brazen election bill yet:

Uh, OK. Worth noting here: So-called “literacy tests” were still legal in the late 1950s, as were poll taxes. Both measures were aimed at limiting the votes — and influence — of African American voters.

But Fillmore’s bill would go even further than putting strictures on when and how you can vote. It would also empower the state legislature to accept or reject election results in the state. Yes, really. As CNN’s Fredreka Schouten reports:

“Under [Fillmore’s] proposal, lawmakers would meet to either ‘accept or reject election results’ following primary and general elections. If legislators reject the results, any qualified voter ‘may file an action in the Superior Court to request that a new election be held,’ according to the bill. Fillmore said lawmakers should possess authority as ‘representatives of the people’ to review the vote count.”

This is the radical Independent State Legislature doctrine (unsupported at law or in history) being pushed by the far-right, for which four radical Republican Supreme Court Justices have already indicated they are willing to consider.

Er, that feels, how to say it, totally un-democratic? The legislature would be able to overturn the election results based only on an ill-defined review of the process? The potential to abjure the will of the people in order to advance a partisan agenda seems vast.

Lest you think Fillmore is on a lonely quest to subvert democracy, well, he’s not. Fifteen Republican legislators have signed on to Fillmore’s bill, including Rep. Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona secretary of state.

Remember too that this is Arizona, the state in which Trump-aligned Republicans pushed a sham [fraudit] of the 2020 presidential election vote. Despite the many irregularities in the process, it still failed to produce any evidence that the result — Joe Biden beat Trump by just under 11,000 votes — was incorrect. “The ballots that were provided to us to count in the coliseum very accurately correlate with the official canvass numbers,” said one of the men charged with overseeing the so-called audit.

It’s not clear whether Fillmore’s bill can pass either chamber; Republicans hold single-seat edges in both the state House and state Senate. And while Gov. Doug Ducey is a Republican, he has not been someone willing to go along with Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

That legislation like this is even proposed, however, speaks to how far down the rabbit hole Republicans have gone when it comes to Trump’s conspiracy theories about the last election.

The Senate Government Committee is stacked with MAGA/QAnon cult members and election deniers who promote Trump’s Big Lie.

The QAnon Queen, Sen. Kelly Townsend is chair of the Government Committee. Fellow QAnon cult members and election deniers who promote Trump’s Big Lie are Sens. Wendy Togers and Sonny Borrelli. And there’s the guy who has sponsored the most Jim Crow 2.0 GQP voter suppression bills in the legislature, J.D. Mesnard.

Democrats defending truth and democracy on the Government Committee are Sens. Martín Quezada, Sally Ann Gonzales, and Theresa Hatathlie.

There will be no surprise on how this vote is going to go on this MAGA/QAnon Big Lie election denier bill from Rep. John Filmore. It is going to be crazy town in today’s committee hearing, as it has been in earlier committee hearings on MAGA/QAnon cult election denier bills. The only appropriate response from the sane public is to shout them down with “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Every one of these evil GQP bastards is an enemy of democracy and needs to be removed from office.