The New Neo

[NOTE: This third part of the series has been sitting around in draft form too long. So even though the caravan has moved on, I’m posting it before it gets even more stale. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.]

How could the voting machine debacle in Maricopa County have been prevented? I really don’t see how it could have been predicted that so many machines in Maricopa would either go bonkers on Election Day or would be fiddled with to make them go bonkers on Election Day. But one of those two things happened and once it happened there was no redress because the courts wouldn’t order one, short of a smoking cannon or series of cannons that were never going to materialize.

More generally, however, let’s take a look at this article about Arizona voting security efforts from a while back. It was published the week before the 2022 election:

More than a million ballots for the Nov. 8 election already have been cast in Arizona, which was an early adopter of voting by mail. State lawmakers created the system in 1991 with bipartisan support. Three decades later, that’s how the vast majority of Arizonans cast ballots.

Note that the law establishing a vote-by-mail system was established in Arizona thirty years ago with bipartisan support. I doubt that the people voting for it back then foresaw the problems it would entail; those were very different days. Now the system is deeply entrenched there. But many of the problems alleged in 2022 in Maricopa County don’t seem to have involved that process.

On more recent voting system legal challenges in Arizona [emphasis mine]:

Fast-growing Arizona shifted from a reliably red state to choosing Democratic President Joe Biden by a narrow margin in 2020. That sparked months of lawsuits and a review of Phoenix area ballots by state Senate GOP leaders and allies of former President Donald Trump…

Arizona’s election system has survived multiple legal challenges, although some appeals continue. Lake and Finchem sued to end the use of ballot-counting machines, but a federal judge tossed the case. They appealed the ruling. And the Republican Party of Arizona lost its lawsuit claiming the long practice of early voting violated the state’s Constitution. That case now sits with the state Court of Appeals.

Remember, that was written the week before the election. Moreover:

Lawmakers have changed some of the state’s election laws in recent years, and voters on Nov. 8 will decide on a ballot measure that would tighten voter ID requirements. Here’s a look at those changes and how voting works in Arizona.

There’s much much more at the link and well worth reading. I also had described some of the Arizona efforts and what happened to them in this post and in this one as well. Suffice to say it often comes down to the courts, and they often thwart the efforts of the right to change things.

The bottom line is that voter fraud can only be prevented in a county or a state or a country in which the vast majority of people are committed to doing so, and that includes the courts. Otherwise, it will occur because the rewards are high and the chances of being meaningfully punished are exceedingly low. And it doesn’t even matter whether it does occur or whether it only strongly appears to occur; the damage to public trust is done either way.

There also was a referendum on the ballot in 2022 in Arizona that would have tightened up voter ID laws. It was rejected by a margin that is similar although not identical to the margin by which Kari Lake lost.

Also, there’s more about that ruling in October 2022, when Lake and Finchem sued to stop voting machine tabulation. Their suit was thrown out, with this statement from the judge:

In Friday’s order, Judge John J. Tuchi tossed the lawsuit in full, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the lawsuit and that their claims are “vague,” “speculative” and ultimately amount to “conjectural allegations.” Additionally, the judge declared that the dismissal of the plaintiffs’ suit is further warranted under the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which restricts individuals from bringing lawsuits against states in federal court. The judge stated that, in this case, the “plaintiffs do not plausibly allege a violation of federal law…[and their] complaint asks the federal court to oversee the administrative details of a local election. We find no constitutional basis for doing so.” Finally, the judge referenced the Purcell principle and explained that, even if the court had jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ suit, given the imminence of the November midterm elections the plaintiffs’ “request [for] a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures” is implausible. In his order, the judge wholly discredited the plaintiffs’ fallacious claims against electronic voting machines, citing numerous audits — which were undertaken following the 2020 election to assess Maricopa County’s tabulation equipment — that proved no evidence of fraud or compromised election security due to the use of the machines.

So they weren’t allowed to stop it ahead of time and they couldn’t do it afterwards. They couldn’t prove it to the court’s satisfaction back in 2020 and therefore they couldn’t allege it prior to the 2022 election. That’s lawfare for you, and one of many examples of the way in which it makes legal challenges to voting practices very difficult – unless, of course, the rule being challenged is considered by the court to have a negative effect on some minority racial group.

And here is a very important article, Rachel Alexander’s explanation of the war on attorneys who represent people on the right and who take these voting challenge cases. It takes a lot of courage to do so, and a group called “The 65 Project” is very upfront about it their program to intimidate these attorneys and prevent them from doing the job (the quote is from the Project’s website):

Following Biden’s victory, an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on bogus assertions to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump and his “Big Lie Lawyers” have “learned lessons” from 2020 and are already working to seize control of state and local election processes and to prepare for alicious election litigation efforts.

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

“Bipartisan” – perhaps because of allied NeverTrumpers? – gives them sanctimonious cover. What they are doing is completely against all principles of the legal profession, but they feel protected.

And speaking of protecting – fortifying – future elections, lower down on their page we have this:

Protecting future elections

As the January 6th Committee’s work has confirmed, lawyers played a central role in then-President Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. Many of these lawyers, and their conduct, are subject to ethics rules. But just as Trump and his allies sought to exploit vagueness in the Electoral Count Act, so too have some lawyers evaded accountability because of gaps in the legal profession’s ethical rules. And just as Congress is rushing to fill those statutory holes, state supreme courts also must address certain weaknesses in the rules of professional conduct.

We are working closely with law professors and professional responsibility practitioners to develop model rules, and we will push state bar associations to adopt them.

Who are the fascists here? Power is everything.