But what gives? (the article is from yesterday):

It’s taking far longer than expected in multiple counties across Arizona to count ballots and report election results.

The delay means numerous congressional, statewide, and local races have yet to be called, including a U.S. Senate contest and races that would help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House. Voter advocates are warning that voters won’t have enough time to fix any problems with their ballots if the counting goes on too long. …

The long, two-page ballot that many counties had in this election was to blame for delays in at least some instances. For example, in Maricopa County and Pima County, it’s taking longer to remove mail ballots from their envelopes and unfold and inspect them.

In other counties, the problems vary. Cochise County is experiencing a mechanical problem with its tabulators that’s causing them to operate slowly …

In both Yavapai and Pinal counties, tabulating polling place results from Election Day took much longer than expected because of unclear voter marks that had to be sorted out before results from the polling place could be reported. …

Yuma County still had 40% of its ballots to count as of Thursday night, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. It’s unclear why. …

A coalition of dozens of voting rights groups are concerned that, because of the delays, voters will not have enough time to respond to counties that flagged a mismatched or missing signature on their mail ballots. Under state law, the deadline for fixing those issues is Sunday, while counties had not yet reviewed hundreds of thousands of voter signatures on ballots across the state as of Thursday night.

Whatever is going on – and it appears to be plenty – it undermines the already low trust in the integrity of the election process in the state.

Here’s an article that appeared today:

In Arizona, official tallies were 83% complete by mid-morning on Saturday with Trump leading at 52.7% and Harris at 46%, or about 180,000 votes ahead. But enough ballots remain uncounted – 602,000 as of late Friday night – for the state to remain undeclared. The state sensationally flipped to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020.

Indeed. It’s a very good thing that the presidency is no longer in doubt, even without Arizona. But there is that Senate seat, and those House seats. The latter in particular could be highly important.

Also:

In the key US Senate race there between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego, Lake, who always denied that Biden won the White House fairly in 2020, was trailing the Democrat 48.5% to 49.5%, or by around 33,000 votes, mid-morning on Saturday.

So it’s still up in the air. More [my emphasis]:

The delay in reporting the races falls largely on Maricopa county, the fourth largest in the US, where the state capital, Phoenix, lies. The county on Friday evening reported 351,000 ballots yet to count. Some have not been through the first step of verifying the voter signature on the outside of the envelope. Officials expected ballot counting would continue for 10 to 13 days after election day.

There is no excuse for this – none. But here are the excuses offered:

The long process for counting ballots is in part explained by the lengthy two-page ballot itself with election workers taking nearly double the usual amount of time to separate the two sheets from the mail-in envelope, lay them flat and check for damage, according to Votebeat.

In Cochise county, a mechanical problem with tabulators caused them to work more slowly.

According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, part of the state’s problem is “early-late” votes – early voting ballot papers that were filled in don’t get dropped off to be counted until election day itself.

“We have a substantial number of voters who take their early ballot and they kind of keep it on their kitchen counter for, like, three weeks,” state representative Alexander Kolodin told AZ Central.

Kolodin, a Republican, is considering a proposal that would require early ballots to be returned in advance of election day, giving time for election officials to go through the process of verification.

Ya think?

It’s almost as though Arizona wants to be in this position. And people can be forgiven for being very very suspicious.

The post Arizona, bringing up the rear appeared first on The New Neo.

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.

The post The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part III appeared first on The New Neo.

Lake’s loss of her election fraud suit was a foregone conclusion. And yet the court is closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, because you can’t force people to trust elections by shrieking, “You must trust us!” Trust must be earned, and once lost it must be regained or it continues to be lost.

I have been consistent in saying that election fraud must be prevented because courts will not redress it after the fact except in very minor cases such as a person submitting two ballots instead of one. The Kari Lake trial is a good example, because the plaintiffs (Lake’s side) had unusually good evidence for mass fraud that may indeed have mattered in the outcome. And yet it was always clear that the evidence wasn’t enough for a verdict in her favor and could not possibly be enough. Here’s a discussion of the ruling against Lake [emphasis mine]:

Judge Peter A. Thompson ruled in favor of the defendants on all counts on December 24 2022. A copy of the opinion is here 4531 (maricopa.gov).

The court permitted two counts from the original ten in the Complaint to proceed to Trial: 1) the claim that ballot-on-demand (“BOD”) printer malfunctions experienced on Election Day were caused intentionally and that these malfunctions resulted in a changed outcome (Complaint Count II); and 2) the claim that Maricopa County violated its own election procedures manual (“EPM”) as to chain of custody procedures in such a way as to result in a changed election outcome (Complaint Count IV).

After laying out the “clear and convincing” burden of proof Lake needed to carry, the court summarized and evaluated the witnesses and evidence Lake presented. The court looked to Arizona case law going back to 1898, before we became a state in 1912, for the proposition “it is . . . unwise to lay down any rule by which the certainty and accuracy of an election may be jeopardized by the reliance upon any proof affecting such results that is not of the most clear and conclusive character.”

I submit that, realistically, that standard cannot be met. I also submit that the standard’s existence is understandable. It would be enormously chaotic if every suspicion of election fraud – even a strong suspicion that many people share – could overturn any election. Nothing would be certain, every election that wasn’t a landslide (and even some of those) would be challenged, the remedies might have to be to repeat elections over and over, and might result in a rapidly ever-changing succession of public officials none of whom were trusted or respected. It would be a nightmare.

But it’s another kind of nightmare to see obviously suspect elections, exacerbated by the omnipresence of computers and the prevalence of mail-in voting (especially in states where everyone on the obviously-flawed voter rolls is mailed a ballot whether requested or not, and once ballots are taken from envelopes there’s no saying where those ballots actually originated), with no redress in the courts. The frustration and distrust builds and builds and builds in the losers and it’s not even just limited to them.

In a case such as Kari Lake’s, what sort of proof would be enough for the court? The only sort of thing I can imagine would be a set of emails or recordings in which those in charge of the machines are seen or heard while plotting to reprogram them in order to aid the left. Or a mass confession on the part of said officials. Short of that sort of thing, forget about it.

We have to be able to trust our elections. But the only way to foster trust or restore it is to have more safeguards in place at the outset against fraud. In the name of voter inclusion as they define it, Democrats seem determined to jettison even many of the elementary and obvious safeguards such as voter ID, and this effort raises the amount of suspicion that their goal is to enable fraud – which is easiest to perform in the populous blue counties they usually control (Maricopa County is a GOP-controlled anomaly, but the GOP there detests Trump supporters such as Lake). Calling people who see the evidence as strongly indicative that fraud occurred “election deniers” might actually work to demonize them in the eyes of others, but it does absolutely nothing to increase the trust that is so necessary to a functioning democracy or a functioning republic. And we have most definitely lost that trust.

I don’t see us getting it back anytime soon.

Whenever I write about this sort of topic, many commenters write to say that the GOP doesn’t care and has made little effort to fix things. I often see statements like that all over the right side of the blogosphere. But it’s not the case; there have been many efforts, and I’ve documented some of them in many posts and comments of my own. I want to call your attention to this post as well as this one. In both of those posts I describe only a fraction of those efforts and why they have mostly failed unless a state is already quite Republican/conservative to begin with.

I strongly suggest you take a look at those posts if you haven’t already. And no, my motive isn’t to defend the GOP. It’s to inject more reality into the discussion. Has the GOP left no stone unturned? I very much doubt it. But they’ve done quite a bit and the deck is stacked against them. This is the last paragraph of that second post of mine that I linked, and I’ll repeat it for emphasis:

It’s instructive to do some basic research and discover what actually was tried, and what failed, and why, and what the obstacles are that need to somehow be overcome. But the left feeds on ignorance – not only of its own voters, but of some GOP voters as well.

[NOTE: Part II will be specifically about the efforts that were made to tighten voting security in Arizona prior to this election, and why so many of them failed.]

The post The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part I appeared first on The New Neo.

I haven’t watched any of the trial myself, and from the accounts I’ve read I’m a bit confused as to what actually must be proved in this case in order to win, and what the court would be willing to apply as a remedy if that burden were met. Maybe it’s because it’s not been made clear?

At any rate, here are some links to articles on the proceedings: this, this, and this.

There certainly have been witnesses alleging to the strange goings-on, which were egregious. Some of them have said that these things could not have occurred unintentionally and must instead have been intentional, but I don’t know whether the judge will buy it. Then of course there’s the aforementioned question of how far the plaintiff (Lake) has to go to prove she would have won the election otherwise.

My gut feeling is that despite the strong evidence of chicanery and even more powerful evidence of egregious negligence in the way this election was run – almost certainly contributing to and perhaps determining Lake’s loss – the court will be reluctant to do anything about it except some sort of mild admonition to Maricopa County to clean up its act.

In general, courts do not want to decide elections and there is an enormous presumption in favor of letting things stand no matter what. As I’ve said before, the only way to deal with these things is to prevent them from happening.

Of course, if Lake wins her case and a new election is called, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The post Kari Lake’s election challenge trial so far appeared first on The New Neo.

Recall that Goldwater came from Arizona. And so did the 2008 candidate detested by the non-GOPe wing, John McCain.

So the bitterness between Republicans concerning the voting in Maricopa County is the latest iteration. Kari Lake has this to say:

“This botched election should not be certified, especially in Maricopa County, where the board of supervisors are well aware of the catastrophic issues caused by the maladministration of Supervisor Bill Gates and County Recorder Steven Richer, who started a dark money PAC with the sole purpose of going after me, my campaign, and our movement while they supervised the election (emphasis added),” Lake revealed. “Let me repeat that: They ran an election with my name on the ballot, and their number one political goal was to see to it that I was not elected. Can you say, ‘conflict of interest’?”

Both Gates and Richer are Republicans, but they are not keen on Lake and her so-called “election denial” and in fact Gates was in charge in 2020, a year about which she was criticizing the results. He’s been upset about the audit that was done concerning the voting that year; after all, it’s an implicit criticism of his leadership. Back in 2021 he had this to say about it:

“The 2020 election … was the best election we’ve ever run in Maricopa County,” said Bill Gates, vice chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Gates, a Republican, called criticism of the election results a “staggering refusal to follow the will of the voters.”

He said that in addition to the routine checks, the county supervisors authorized two audits that found no hacking or manipulation with the voting machines used in the election.

“It should have ended there,” Gates said.

So when Kari Lake ran on the idea that the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up, she was attacking Bill Gates, who was still running the show. In this article from September of 2022, in the buildup to the midterms, we learn this:

“Unfortunately, all these election deniers were successful here in Arizona, in a swing state,” said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has faced vitriolic backlash for defending the 2020 election against Trump’s false claims of fraud. “So we’ll see if those folks are able to win in the general election. I think that will give us a feel on where this party is headed in the future.”

Gates was censured by Legislative District 3 Republicans last month for saying election-denying GOP candidates may have to lose for the party to find its way.

You can’t call him a disinterested party. And of course Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor who was declared the winner, is the opposite of a disinterested party and should have recused herself. I’d actually say the same for Gates.

NOTE: If there hadn’t been widespread malfunction of the voting machines in Maricopa on Election Day, I doubt we’d be talking about this now. And yet so far I haven’t seen any acknowledgement by Gates and/or Hobbs that the situation in Maricopa on Election Day was terrible and could not help but raise suspicions. As far as I can tell, they seem to be acting as though all the brouhaha is manufactured and they have nothing to explain and nothing of which to be ashamed. If anyone can find any acknowledgement by these players of the serious problems involved in the 2022 elections in Maricopa, please post a link in the comments.

The post Maricopa fight highlights the bitter disagreements between the GOPe and the Trump wing appeared first on The New Neo.

Mohave County Board of Supervisors Chairman Ron Gould said Monday he chose to canvass the 2022 Arizona general election because otherwise, he’d be arrested.

“What we found out today from the county attorney is, essentially, if I have a question with how our election is run and I don’t get my question answered, I have no choice but to canvass the election, which is the technical word for certifying it,” Ron Gould told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Gaydos and Chad Show on Monday.

“Or I’ll be charged with a felony.”

I’m curious what the charges would be – obviously not minor, because he says it would be at the felony level. Is “election denial” now a crime? Or perhaps it’s somehow connected to the fact that there were no irregularities reported in Mohave County and his failure to certify was based on Maricopa’s problems? Gould has said “that they chose to make the political statement because when elections are run poorly in the state’s most populous county it disenfranchises the smaller, rural counties.”

The article also said that, had Mohave County not come on board, that county’s vote would have been excluded in the final certification. Mohave County is a majority-GOP county, so it certainly wouldn’t have helped the Republicans, but the Democrats won anyway so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered much if at all.

In addition, there’s this, which I found towards the end of the article. It involves Cochise County, which is the last Arizona holdout county refusing to certify:

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit Monday night against the Cochise County Board of Supervisors for not certifying the election by the state’s required Nov. 28 deadline.

That’s the final sentence in the article. It fails to mention what many know, which is that Katie Hobbs cannot possibly be considered a disinterested and neutral party. She was the Democrat nominee for governor, and the winner over Kari Lake in 2022 in a very close race. As the present Secretary of State in charge of supervising her own election, she refused to recuse herself despite calls to do so and the fact that her conflict of interest is blatant and glaringly obvious.

What’s going on in Arizona highlights several important points. The first is that in states with early voting, the GOP strategy of voting on Election Day and not before is not a good idea.

The second is that – and I’ve already said this many times – the only remedy available is prevention because once an election is done it’s virtually impossible to prove fraud or error that mattered, unless it’s a counting error that involves paper ballots (which is not the usual situation at all). It doesn’t matter how suspicious the events are and how they undermine trust in elections. Trust is not the point; suppression of dissent is the point, and those with power will exercise it to its full extent.

And the third is that integrity is almost nonexistent. In years past, it seems to me that someone in the position of Katie Hobbs would have recused herself to prevent the appearance of impropriety and bias. It was understood how important that is. No more. Power is everything, and they intend to never lose it.

The post The Arizona election mess continues appeared first on The New Neo.

And trust must be earned.

For example:

Arizona’s Maricopa County is the state’s most populated county. Polling places had printer machine problems the second they opened.

A few problems include running out of ballots and machines printing illegible ballots…

The Republican Party and the campaigns for Republican governor candidate Kari Lake and Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused county officials of incompetence. All three sued the county “over issues with the voting tabulation machines.”

Maricopa County officials assured everyone they would count everyone’s ballot and no one would be disenfranchised. They also claim no one turned away voters on Tuesday.

The Republicans tried to expand poll hours, but a judge said no way.

That’s odd because other places with machine issues stayed open later.

You may recall that Maricopa had issues, although different ones, in 2020. Also, that Maricopa is a red county. The people locally in charge overall in the county are Republicans, but in the past they’ve acted very strangely when challenged and have defended themselves rather than much else. And I’m pretty sure that not everyone with access to machines is a Republican.

You may also recall that this year, gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs is the Arizona Secretary of State and in charge of voting integrity, but did not recuse herself:

“We’ve seen this time and time again,” Lake said in a news conference at the Mexican border. “She’s running her office with a great incompetency and maybe maladministration. The ethical thing would be for her to recuse yourself. I don’t think she’s going to do it. And that’s a problem.”

Lake also noted that 6,000 Arizona voters erroneously received mail-in ballots that only featured federal races as she was trying to paint Hobbs as incompetent.

Hobbs, who has faced calls to recuse herself and to resign from her post as secretary of state to ensure a fair and free election, refuses to do it.

Hobbs told the media over the weekend that she will do what she was elected to do in 2018.

“I took an oath of office to do the job that voters elected me to do,” Hobbs told NBC News. “That oath says I’ll uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution laws of the state of Arizona.”

Okay Katie, that’s tremendously reassuring.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of “issues,” California allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to a week after the election, as long as they’re postmarked by the day of the election.

Can’t even imagine why that would undermine faith in the integrity of the system.

The post Maricopa County has issues again appeared first on The New Neo.