Arizona Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to stop the forensic audit by state Senate Republicans of the 2020 election, and now they are settling for transparency measures as the audit continues:
NBC NEWS – Arizona Democrats won concessions Wednesday in settling their challenge to Republicans’ unprecedented audit of 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election, but they failed to block the review as they had sought.
The state Democratic Party had sued the Republican Party and Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based cybersecurity company it hired to conduct an audit of ballots in Maricopa, the state’s most populous county. The audit, which grew out of Arizona GOP lawmakers’ efforts to toss out Joe Biden’s victory in the state last year, is being led by those who believe, baselessly, that the Arizona vote was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
The agreement orders Arizona Senate Republicans and Cyber Ninjas, which is run by a supporter of Trump, to allow independent elections experts to observe the process, take aggressive measures to secure personal voter information, turn over details about audit policies and procedures and make those documents public. If there is a breach of the agreement, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, can take the company and the Senate GOP to court for breach of contract.
Notice how this news article nearly DRIPS with judgement from NBC News. The author emphasizes how this audit is ‘unprecedented’ and says that Republicans behind the audit ‘baselessly’ believe the vote was stolen from Trump. And of course, they note that Cyber Ninjas is run by a Trump supporter, as if to say the audit won’t be trustworthy if it finds wrongdoing.
And that’s just in the first three paragraphs. The entire article is heavily tilted in this same direction, so much so you’d think this was really an op-ed and not an actual news article.
In any event, state Democrats didn’t get what they really wanted, even though they act like all they wanted was more transparency. And you can be sure that they’ll use this new agreement with Republicans to undermine the audit in any way they can to ensure the public doesn’t put any trust in the results should Republicans find significant fraud.
Remember, this audit isn’t just about finding fraud, but about informing the process to help Republicans reform their election laws. With slim majorities in both the state House and Senate, Republicans will have to keep all of their members together in order to put reform legislation on the governor’s desk. This is an uphill battle to be sure.