WASHINGTON — The presidential election was almost five months ago, but Arizona Republicans still can’t give up on their bizarre voter fraud conspiracies. Despite the lack of evidence for any of the GOP’s fraud claims, the Arizona Senate GOP is charging ahead with their own audit, and they hired a company owned by prominent “Stop the Steal” advocate Doug Logan to conduct it.
“The Arizona Senate Republicans’ choice of vendors makes it clear: this is a political stunt,” said Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee executive director Heather Williams. “Republicans concocted this fantasy and saw their claims repeatedly rejected by courts in Arizona and across the country. This is a ridiculous partisan stunt and a deeply irresponsible waste of taxpayer resources.”
While Logan deleted his Twitter account in January, an archive of his posts shows that he repeatedly spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud in last year’s election. He also retweeted “Kraken” enthusiast Sidney Powell, who recently argued in a court filing about her attempts to invalidate the election that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”
An audit of voting machines already found they were working perfectly, and a limited hand recount found a perfect match with the machine-generated tabulation.
Republicans’ bogus fraud claims have fueled their new push to increase barriers to voting, measures that threaten to disenfranchise Arizonans. One Arizona House Republican admitted that the focus on restricting voting was related to concerns about the “quality” of voters, a rationale that echoes Jim Crow-era voting restrictions.
Across the country, at least 600 Republican elected officials spread misinformation about voter fraud during the election, a conspiracy theory that helped fuel the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.
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