Arizona GOP lawmaker asks attorney general to investigate election allegations

PHOENIX — A member of the ad-hoc panel that heard 10 hours of allegations of election fraud at a forum on Monday now wants Arizona’s attorney general to investigate.

State Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, sent Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich a link Tuesday to the YouTube video of the unofficial hearing and asked that he “investigate each claim made” by a parade of witnesses.

Townsend lamented that she has been told none of the allegations forwarded to the Attorney General’s Office have been acted upon because there’s no proof something illegal occurred.

These range from people who contend they saw something amiss in processing ballots, to statistical contentions there is no way President Trump could have lost Arizona and Democrat Joe Biden could have gotten as many votes as the official count says.

Townsend wants some response from Brnovich in the next 24 to 48 hours.

“I think where there’s smoke you have to go find the fire,” she said. “We provided them smoke. And they need to go and find the fire.”

A spokesman for Brnovich, Ryan Anderson, would not respond to Townsend’s allegations. He said his office will send a response to the lawmaker within her deadline.

Townsend, who heads the House Committee on Elections, said it is questions like those just raised that led her to push last year for creation of the Election Integrity Unit within Brnovich’s office.

Lawmakers allocated $530,000 for its operation. It has been operating since early this year, starting with the presidential preference primary in March.

The legislator said she’s prepared to accept the conclusion of the Attorney General’s Office if investigators look into the complaints and find there are no violations.

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“And if there’s one, deal with it,” she said. “But to say that ‘there’s nothing here to look’ at is hogwash.”

But it might be difficult for any investigator to use what came out of the Monday forum as basis for an investigation or a source of proof.

None of the Arizonans who spoke were under oath. And all the questioning came either from lawmakers like Townsend, who said they are already convinced there was fraud in the just-completed election, or from presidential attorney Rudolph Giuliani.

Some of the witnesses were brought to Arizona by Giuliani and his team, who have been going from state to state in a bid to convince lawmakers they should overturn the reported popular vote.

In Arizona, they want the Legislature to declare Biden’s win — officially certified Monday by top elected officials of both parties — and instead select electors who would cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for President Trump.

Townsend made reference to that possibility, citing a provision of the U.S. Constitution. “It is our duty to select electors for the presidential election,” she wrote to Brnovich. “And I am not confident that fraud did not exist in the 2020 general election.”

Townsend, who will be a state senator next year, told Brnovich that the video is “initial evidence,” promising to follow up with an itemized list of the contents.

Her bid for Brnovich to investigate comes as Trump’s U.S. attorney general, William Barr, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Trump did not respond to the comments of his attorney general.