As the board dawdled over releasing election records, a gathered crowd grew unruly.
“We want our voices heard,” members of the angry 60-person group chanted.
The government was not doing enough, from their point of view, to prove that the results of an election were not fraudulent.
It was the Pima County Board of Supervisors in January 2008, and the election in question was the 2006 Pima County vote over a half-cent sales tax to fund a new transportation plan and establish a Regional Transportation Authority. It passed by 60% to 40%, a surprisingly big margin.
More than a year after the election, doubts had grown over whether the election was legitimate. Attorney Bill Risner spearheaded an effort to search for evidence of irregularities or fraud, and the Pima County Democratic Party signed onto a lawsuit seeking records.
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Among other things, they sought a hand count of the election, handled by the attorney general’s office. That count, facilitated by the attorney general but carried out by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, found the original count was correct. But that did not prove anything, as far as Risner and allies were concerned.
Risner and I spoke Tuesday, and he aired his suspicion that the attorney general’s staff “came down, got all the ballots, put them in a separate storage room, where it appears the ballot boxes were stuffed.” In other words, the fraud that started in Pima County was perpetuated by then-Attorney General Terry Goddard, in Risner’s view.
Twelve years later, it’s Arizona Republicans who are going down the rabbit hole of election-fraud suspicions. True-believing Trump supporters keep changing their demands, but their underlying conviction remains the same: Trump was cheated out of winning Arizona, and probably the presidency. The only problem is finding the evidence.
Trump loyalists have filed lawsuits, held hearings and, on Monday, offered up alternative slates of electors to the ones who actually cast Arizona’s Electoral College votes. Nothing convincing has emerged to suggest Trump actually was cheated in Arizona, but the dead-enders deeply believe it was so.
So they insist on new measures that will prove their conviction correct.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Monday at which they expressed worries about election integrity that ranged from realistic to ridiculous. At the end, the result was predictable: More investigation must be done to prove the conspiracy that they believe is true. The new demand: an audit of election hardware and software.
“We hold an audit and we see what the outcome is,” said the committee chairman, Sen Eddie Farnsworth. “And then we can put this to rest.”
Maricopa County should probably do it, provided that a truly independent and competent auditor can be found. But if the audit shows nothing wrong, you can count on the dead-enders maintaining their conviction that Trump was cheated and changing their demands once again.
There is only one right answer, to the election fraud believers.
This became particularly clear Monday afternoon when 22 state legislators and eight legislators-elect signed a letter to the United States Congress. Signatories — including Southern Arizona Reps. Mark Finchem and Bret Roberts, as well as Sen. David Gowan — claimed that election fraud had occurred, corrupting the vote.
Their conclusion was not that Arizona’s electoral votes should not be counted unless their suspicions were investigated. No, instead, they said the Trump electors should be counted.
That, of course, gives away their game: It isn’t really about finding the answers to questions about the election — it’s just about finding a way to give Trump Arizona’s electoral votes.
When Pima County voters cast ballots in the May 2006 RTA election, Risner was already an outspoken opponent of the ballot issue. After the election, he made common cause with John Brakey, an election-integrity activist, and others in challenging the results.
The Democrats joined for a time, but then dropped the suit. Later, the Libertarian Party picked up the baton and became Risner’s clients.
Brakey, who is involved in election-integrity challenges around the country, is also convinced the attorney general’s office came up with bogus results.
“That hand count was a fraud. It really was,” Brakey said Tuesday.
Goddard, who was attorney general then, expressed astonishment that those who doubted the election got the hand count they want and still disbelieve the results.
“To have them now saying it was fraud, when they didn’t at the time, I find pretty extraordinary,” he said.
Tom Ryan, who worked with Risner and Brakey and later served on the county’s Election Integrity Commission, shared their suspicions but not their conclusions. He noted, for example, that the voter databases that the crowd was demanding in January 2008 later showed strange, potentially suspicious things, like precinct data uploaded more than once.
“I don’t think we ever saw enough evidence to indicate that someone was trying to manipulate it,” he told me Tuesday. “I thought the outcome as reported was correct.”
But he noted that, from his experience, the relative lack of evidence of fraud is unlikely to convince anybody who believes it occurred.
“It’s really hard to convince people who are convinced otherwise,” he said.
Now, all three of those men — Risner, Brakey and Ryan — share one proposal that they think could improve confidence in state elections: Make the scanned images of each ballot a public record, so that they can be counted by whoever wants to. Right now, that’s against state law, and it’s something Trump loyalists are also pursuing.
But the truth be told, I don’t see much hope that audits or transparent ballots will ever convince anyone who deeply believes in a different outcome.
Photos: 2020 General Election in Pima County and Arizona
Ballot processing in Pima County
Ballot processing in Pima County
Ballot processing in Pima County
Ballot processing in Pima County
Ballot processing in PIma County
Ballot processing in PIma County
Ballot processing in PIma County
Ballot processing in PIma County
Ballot processing, Pima County
Ballot processing, Pima County
Ballot processing, Pima County
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election 2020 Senate Kelly
Election 2020 Senate Kelly
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election 2020 Arizona Voting
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Election Day, Pima County and Arizona, 2020
Judge throws out lawsuit, finds no fraud or misconduct in Arizona election
PHOENIX — A judge tossed out a bid by the head of the Arizona Republican Party to void the election results that awarded the state’s 11 electoral votes to Democrat Joe Biden.
The two days of testimony produced in the case brought by GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward produced no evidence of fraud or misconduct in how the vote was conducted in Maricopa County, said Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner in his Friday ruling.
Warner acknowledged that there were some human errors made when ballots that could not be read by machines due to marks or other problems were duplicated by hand.
But he said that a random sample of those duplicated ballots showed an accuracy rate of 99.45%.
Warner said there was no evidence that the error rate, even if extrapolated to all the 27,869 duplicated ballots, would change the fact that Biden beat President Trump.
The judge also threw out charges that there were illegal votes based on claims that the signatures on the envelopes containing early ballots were not properly compared with those already on file.
He pointed out that a forensic document examiner hired by Ward’s attorney reviewed 100 of those envelopes.
And at best, Warner said, that examiner found six signatures to be “inconclusive,” meaning she could not testify that they were a match to the signature on file.
But the judge said this witness found no signs of forgery.
Finally, Warner said, there was no evidence that the vote count was erroneous. So he issued an order confirming the Arizona election, which Biden won with a 10,457-vote edge over Trump.
Federal court case remains to be heard
Friday’s ruling, however, is not the last word.
Ward, in anticipation of the case going against her, already had announced she plans to seek review by the Arizona Supreme Court.
And a separate lawsuit is playing out in federal court, which includes some of the same claims made here along with allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
That case, set for a hearing Tuesday, also seeks to void the results of the presidential contest.
It includes allegations that the Dominion Software voting equipment used by Maricopa County is unreliable and was programmed to register more votes for Biden than he actually got.
Legislative leaders call for audit but not to change election results
Along the same lines, Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers on Friday called for an independent audit of the software and equipment used by Maricopa County in the just-completed election.
“There have been questions,” Fann said.
But she told Capitol Media Services it is not their intent to use whatever is found to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election.
In fact, she said nothing in the Republican legislative leaders’ request for the inquiry alleges there are any “irregularities” in the way the election was conducted.
“At the very least, the confidence in our electoral system has been shaken because of a lot of claims and allegations,” Fann said. “So our No. 1 goal is to restore the confidence of our voters.”
Bowers specifically rejected calls by the Trump legal team that the Legislature come into session to void the election results, which were formally certified on Monday.
“The rule of law forbids us to do that,” he said.
In fact, Bowers pointed out, it was the Republican-controlled Legislature that enacted a law three years ago specifically requiring the state’s electors “to cast their votes for the candidates who received the most votes in the official statewide canvass.”
He said that was done because Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote nationwide in 2016 and some lawmakers feared that electors would refuse to cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for Trump, who won Arizona’s race that year.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” Bowers said in a prepared statement. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”
Photos of the 2020 General Election voting, election night and ballot processing in Pima County, Maricopa County and throughout Arizona.
Contact opinion columnist Tim Steller at: tsteller@tucson.com or 807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter.