Townsend, an Apache Junction Republican, had scheduled a committee hearing for Monday afternoon. In the subpoena she issued last week, she’d ordered the supervisors or their representative to appear before her committee. Board Chairman Bill Gates informed Townsend in a letter on Friday that the supervisors “do not feel the need to attend” the hearing, and that they would send Ed Novak, an outside attorney representing the board, as their representative who could answer any questions.

Instead, Townsend declared victory on Monday, saying the supervisors had complied with her subpoena, which sought the same records that the Attorney General’s Office requested as part of its investigation into the so-called “audit” that Senate President Karen Fann ordered into the 2020 general election in Maricopa County.

“The Government Committee scheduled for later today is therefore no longer necessary, as its intended objective has been achieved,” Townsend said in a press statement.

The subpoena was prompted by a March 9 letter from Jennifer Wright, the head of Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s Elections Integrity Unit, to the Board of Supervisors and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer seeking new information and records related to a new phase of her investigation. She also asked for records she said she’d previously requested, which she said the county hadn’t provided. The letter stated that it was the attorney general’s third request for information from the county.

Townsend said she was “tired of waiting” for the attorney general to compel production of the records, so she issued her subpoena.

However, the county said the letter was not the attorney general’s third request for information that had been previously requested. Rather, it was the third overall request for information of any kind from the county.

“The March 9 letter was the first time that Mr. Novak and therefore … the board and the recorder were aware that there was something missing from the previous request. And then, of course, the new things that were in there then needed to be researched and processed,” Fields Moseley, a spokesman for Maricopa County, told the Arizona Mirror.

The only information that hadn’t been provided in response to an earlier request was a few policies that had been inadvertently left out of more than 4,400 pages of policies and procedures the county turned over to the attorney general, Gates told Townsend.

“There has been no complaint from the Attorney General about delay and that is not surprising given the case law related to public records requests and the County’s previous history of accommodating the Attorney General’s requests. Case law requires a prompt response, but that is determined on a case-by-case basis; and no specific timeline has been set by the courts,” Gates wrote.

“Consequently, the Board finds it difficult to understand why you think a short delay in responding to a March 9, 2022 public records request from the Attorney General should require a legislative subpoena from you on March 21, 2022,” Gates added.

Moseley said Townsend’s subpoena had nothing to do with the county providing the materials to the Attorney General’s Office, and that county officials were already working on Wright’s request.

Moseley said those three policies have been provided to the attorney general. Gates’ letter said the county has also turned over 51 voter registration files that Wright requested. Moseley told the Arizona Mirror that the county is still working on Wright’s request for the new materials sought in her letter.

Regarding the county’s assertion that the attorney general’s letter wasn’t the third request for the same information, as opposed to the third request for information in general, Townsend told the Mirror, “that is between the AG and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.”

Townsend said she is researching whether there are other materials requested of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors that it hasn’t yet turned over, and if there are, she will issue more subpoenas.

It’s unclear if the Attorney General’s Office has requested any information or records that Wright didn’t mention in her letter to the county. Moseley said previous subpoenas by Fann and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen are settled matters.

The attorney general’s investigation revolves around the largely debunked findings of Fann’s review of the 2020 election, which was led by organizations with no background in elections-related work and who had deep ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement that has promoted the false allegation that the election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.

Wright’s letter and Townsend’s subpoena also cited the purported findings of Shiva Ayyadurai. Fann’s “audit” team hired Ayyadurai, at a cost of $50,000 in taxpayer money, to conduct a discredited review of voter signatures on early ballot affidavits. That review was riddled with false claims and misleading statements, and he appeared unfamiliar with basic policies and procedures surrounding signature verification.

Ayyadurai has since conducted an independent review of signatures, outside the scope of the “audit,” which he claimed found many signatures that should have never been verified by because they do not match other signatures for those voters.

However, Ayyadurai admitted that he did not use the signatures that county election officials use to compare and verify voters’ signatures on their ballots, and instead used other signature examples he was able to find from documents that are publicly available on the Maricopa County Recorder’s website, which severely undermined the reliability of his alleged findings.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

The bill also included another provision, misunderstood or unread by many legislators, that makes drastic changes to the process for selecting party officials known as precinct committeemen.

Precinct committeemen are voting members of a political party’s legislative district organization. They select the district’s chair and other leadership positions, select members of their party’s state committee, and if legislators from their district and their party vacate their seats, the precinct committeemen select a list of candidates to fill the vacancy. PCs, as they’re known, are elected in primary elections, and form the activist base of Arizona’s political parties.

Many political activists, largely on the Republican side, went into a rage over the weekend when they realized that a provision of House Bill 2839 eliminated PC elections in 2022. Instead, those positions will be appointed by county political party organizations, with the county boards of supervisors signing off to make it official. Many interpreted the bill as also eliminating many PC positions. State law ensures that each precinct gets at least one PC, but also an additional PC for every 125 voters a political party has in a precinct. Lawmakers now read the bill as eliminating those additional PC positions.

House Majority Leader Ben Toma said those two provisions were unintentional drafting errors. The purpose of that section of the bill was to ensure that new precincts that are being redrawn because of the redistricting process get at least one PC.

Because state law prohibits precincts from covering more than one congressional or legislative district, counties have to redraw some of those precinct boundaries. Some of those new precincts have no PCs in them. In fact, some have no people at all. So, to guarantee that they have at least one PC for those precincts, Toma said the bill was intended to create an appointment process for them while retaining the other parts of the election process.

“The intent was never to mess with the current process for all the precincts that already exist,” said Toma, a Republican from Peoria.

GOP party officials, activists and others agitated throughout the weekend, hounding lawmakers over the issue. Though both major parties have PCs, the issue is more central to Republican grassroots activity than to Democrats.

“Members are just being hammered by their PCs right now, many of whom believe that there is some kind of conspiracy to disenfranchise them by canceling the election and appointing them. Many of them are also worried that this gives the parties and their respective (board of supervisors) too much power. If you’ve looked at Twitter today you know what I’m talking about,” Megan Kintner, a lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Counties, told county election officials in an email on Sunday.

By early Monday afternoon, a new proposal to eliminate that part of HB2839 had been introduced in the House of Representatives. And Senate President Karen Fann said the Senate Government Committee will hear a bill to fix the problem on Tuesday, with final passage hopefully coming in the chamber on Wednesday.

However, Democrats could throw a wrench in the plans.

Most legislation doesn’t go into effect until 90 days after the legislative session ends. Legislators can implement new laws immediately, but that can only be done with an emergency clause, which requires a two-thirds supermajority in each chamber. That means at least four Democrats in the Senate and nine in the House must support the plan, presuming it has unanimous Republican backing.

That Democratic support isn’t guaranteed. All three Democrats in the House Rules Committee on Monday voted against permitting the bill to be introduced after the deadline for new legislation. House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, D-Phoenix, said the Republicans can pass whatever they want with a simple majority, but he wouldn’t commit to supporting the plan.

“With regards to whether or not they’ll receive an emergency clause to kick this in … I would be interested to hear a compelling case they could make to myself and my caucus why we should do that,” Bolding told the Arizona Mirror.

Rep. Diego Espinoza, D-Tolleson, seemed a bit more receptive. He said Democrats are vetting the bill and are currently neutral on it. He also noted that there are varying interpretations of the PC provisions of HB2839, and that Republicans’ reading of the bill now is completely different than it was last week. Espinoza was one of the three Democrats to vote against allowing the new bill to be introduced in the House Rules Committee.

But Espinoza seemed open to restoring PC elections in 2022.

“I think that’s a great way to go. At the end of the day, our people are our voices, so whatever our people want is what we’ll do. We serve the people, our people of our great state,” he said.

The disputed language in Section 4 of the bill, or at least the suggestions that legislative staff used to draft the bill, came from election officials in several counties. And whether its intent was to eliminate PC elections depends on who you ask.

Because some counties won’t finish drawing their new precincts until later this month, some PC candidates wouldn’t be able to collect or submit their signatures until late in the filing period, which began Monday. To eliminate what some viewed as the unfairness of that, the positions would all be appointed this year instead.

Yuma County Elections Director Tiffany Anderson, who chairs the Election Officials of Arizona’s legislative committee, said she identified the problem and coordinated with other counties on the proposed legislation, which they had the Arizona Association of Counties convey to Senate staff.

Fann, R-Prescott, described the issue similarly in a statement she posted on Twitter over the weekend.

“Where maintaining the existing election process for PCs would have been detrimental to the parties and their candidates for PC offices is that counties would have provided a new list of number of PC offices per election precinct, including new election precincts, and signature requirements halfway through the candidate filing period,” the statement read. “Counties believed this was unfair to the parties and candidates and we sought a solution to ensure communities in new election precincts would have accurate party representation.”

Despite the furor over provision, most precinct committeemen elections are uncontested, in which case they don’t even appear on the ballot. In Maricopa County in 2020, fewer than 50 of about 2,200 possible precinct committeeman elections were canceled because they were fewer candidates than PC slots, according to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Undoing an emergency change to the way elected political party activists are chosen is proving more difficult than passing the law in the first place.

Lawmakers last week approved legislation intended to standardize the number of signatures that congressional and legislative candidates need to get their names on the ballot. The process was thrown into disarray and confusion by a combination of changes to election laws in recent years, the redistricting process and delays in the 2020 Census. The legislation was introduced and unanimously approved in less than a day so it would be in place on Monday, when candidates can legally begin submitting their nomination petitions to qualify for the ballot.

The bill also included another provision, misunderstood or unread by many legislators, that makes drastic changes to the process for selecting party officials known as precinct committeemen.

Precinct committeemen are voting members of a political party’s legislative district organization. They select the district’s chair and other leadership positions, select members of their party’s state committee, and if legislators from their district and their party vacate their seats, the precinct committeemen select a list of candidates to fill the vacancy. PCs, as they’re known, are elected in primary elections, and form the activist base of Arizona’s political parties.

Many political activists, largely on the Republican side, went into a rage over the weekend when they realized that a provision of House Bill 2839 eliminated PC elections in 2022. Instead, those positions will be appointed by county political party organizations, with the county boards of supervisors signing off to make it official. Many interpreted the bill as also eliminating many PC positions. State law ensures that each precinct gets at least one PC, but also an additional PC for every 125 voters a political party has in a precinct. Lawmakers now read the bill as eliminating those additional PC positions.

House Majority Leader Ben Toma said those two provisions were unintentional drafting errors. The purpose of that section of the bill was to ensure that new precincts that are being redrawn because of the redistricting process get at least one PC.

Because state law prohibits precincts from covering more than one congressional or legislative district, counties have to redraw some of those precinct boundaries. Some of those new precincts have no PCs in them. In fact, some have no people at all. So, to guarantee that they have at least one PC for those precincts, Toma said the bill was intended to create an appointment process for them while retaining the other parts of the election process.

“The intent was never to mess with the current process for all the precincts that already exist,” said Toma, a Republican from Peoria.

GOP party officials, activists and others agitated throughout the weekend, hounding lawmakers over the issue. Though both major parties have PCs, the issue is more central to Republican grassroots activity than to Democrats.

“Members are just being hammered by their PCs right now, many of whom believe that there is some kind of conspiracy to disenfranchise them by canceling the election and appointing them. Many of them are also worried that this gives the parties and their respective (board of supervisors) too much power. If you’ve looked at Twitter today you know what I’m talking about,” Megan Kintner, a lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Counties, told county election officials in an email on Sunday.

By early Monday afternoon, a new proposal to eliminate that part of HB2839 had been introduced in the House of Representatives. And Senate President Karen Fann said the Senate Government Committee will hear a bill to fix the problem on Tuesday, with final passage hopefully coming in the chamber on Wednesday.

However, Democrats could throw a wrench in the plans.

Most legislation doesn’t go into effect until 90 days after the legislative session ends. Legislators can implement new laws immediately, but that can only be done with an emergency clause, which requires a two-thirds supermajority in each chamber. That means at least four Democrats in the Senate and nine in the House must support the plan, presuming it has unanimous Republican backing.

That Democratic support isn’t guaranteed. All three Democrats in the House Rules Committee on Monday voted against permitting the bill to be introduced after the deadline for new legislation. House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, D-Phoenix, said the Republicans can pass whatever they want with a simple majority, but he wouldn’t commit to supporting the plan.

“With regards to whether or not they’ll receive an emergency clause to kick this in … I would be interested to hear a compelling case they could make to myself and my caucus why we should do that,” Bolding told the Arizona Mirror.

Rep. Diego Espinoza, D-Tolleson, seemed a bit more receptive. He said Democrats are vetting the bill and are currently neutral on it. He also noted that there are varying interpretations of the PC provisions of HB2839, and that Republicans’ reading of the bill now is completely different than it was last week. Espinoza was one of the three Democrats to vote against allowing the new bill to be introduced in the House Rules Committee.

But Espinoza seemed open to restoring PC elections in 2022.

“I think that’s a great way to go. At the end of the day, our people are our voices, so whatever our people want is what we’ll do. We serve the people, our people of our great state,” he said.

The disputed language in Section 4 of the bill, or at least the suggestions that legislative staff used to draft the bill, came from election officials in several counties. And whether its intent was to eliminate PC elections depends on who you ask.

Because some counties won’t finish drawing their new precincts until later this month, some PC candidates wouldn’t be able to collect or submit their signatures until late in the filing period, which began Monday. To eliminate what some viewed as the unfairness of that, the positions would all be appointed this year instead.

Yuma County Elections Director Tiffany Anderson, who chairs the Election Officials of Arizona’s legislative committee, said she identified the problem and coordinated with other counties on the proposed legislation, which they had the Arizona Association of Counties convey to Senate staff.

Fann, R-Prescott, described the issue similarly in a statement she posted on Twitter over the weekend.

“Where maintaining the existing election process for PCs would have been detrimental to the parties and their candidates for PC offices is that counties would have provided a new list of number of PC offices per election precinct, including new election precincts, and signature requirements halfway through the candidate filing period,” the statement read. “Counties believed this was unfair to the parties and candidates and we sought a solution to ensure communities in new election precincts would have accurate party representation.”

Despite the furor over provision, most precinct committeemen elections are uncontested, in which case they don’t even appear on the ballot. In Maricopa County in 2020, fewer than 50 of about 2,200 possible precinct committeeman elections were canceled because they were fewer candidates than PC slots, according to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

The censure, which has no practical effect, was for comments calling for people she perceived as enemies to be hanged from gallows, and for social media postings Rogers made threatening to “personally destroy” fellow Republicans who sought to punish her. The censure resolution was silent on her embrace of white nationalists and a string of antisemitic and racist things she had posted online in recent days.

Rogers, a Flagstaff Republican, didn’t defend or even address her comments on the Senate floor. Instead, she called the censure an attempt to limit her freedom of speech.

“I represent hundreds of thousands of people and the majority of them are with me. And they want me to be their voice. You are really censuring them. I do not apologize. I will not back down. And I am sorely disappointed in the leadership of this body for colluding with the Democrats to attempt to destroy my reputation,” Rogers said. “In the end, I rejoice in knowing I do and say what is right. And I speak as a free American, regardless of the actions of this corrupted process today.”

However, Senate President Karen Fann said the censure wasn’t about freedom of speech.

“We do support First Amendment freedom of speech. We absolutely support it. We fight battles over it. But what we do not condone is members threatening each other, to ruin each other, to incite violence, to call us communists. We don’t do that to each other,” said Fann, a Prescott Republican. “We, as elected officials, are held to a higher standard.”

Sen. Lisa Otondo, D-Yuma, noted that Rogers referred to freedom of speech as “one of the most precious rights we have under heaven.”

“My message to you is, that is not freedom of speech. That is bullying and dehumanization. And that is below hell,” Otondo said.

Some Republican senators expressed hope that, despite what they saw as the necessity of the vote, the Senate’s members could continue their work together through the rest of the legislative session. Sen. Vince Leach, R-Tucson, compared the Senate to a family dealing with a disruption.

“I would hope beyond hope that, once this is done, that our family gets back together, that we go back to work and complete the work that we were sent here to do,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray expressed similar sentiments, urging his colleagues to consider the policy, not the sponsor, when they vote on legislation.

“I do want to make clear to everybody that I am opposed to the kind of rhetoric that we’ve heard. But, as a senator, I also separate personality from policy. And I hope all in this body will do the same thing,” said Gray, a Sun City Republican.

Republicans have only a 16-14 majority in the Senate, meaning Rogers could block any GOP bill that doesn’t have Democratic support from passing.

Rogers spoke to the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference on Feb. 25. She called for gallows to be built so “high-level criminals” and “traitors who have betrayed our country” can be publicly hanged. She also unleashed a torrent of antisemitic tropes on social media over the weekend earlier this week, and voiced overt support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

After Gray publicly stated on Monday that discussions were underway about a possible censure, Rogers threatened retaliation against any GOP colleagues who joined the effort, writing on social media, “I will personally destroy the career of any Republican who partakes in the gaslighting of me simply because of the color of my skin or opinion about a war I don’t want to send our kids to die in.”

Following the vote, Rogers was far from chastened. On Twitter and Telegram, she defended herself and blasted the censure motion, which she summarized as the Senate saying, “we don’t like your mean tweets.”

“Those lying saying I was calling for violence are false. I was calling for justice and I still do,” Rogers said.

Rogers reposted messages from supporters on Telegram referring to the senators who censured her “godless commies” and calling the vote “Karen Fann’s last betrayal before she slithers away into retirement.” Fann is not running for re-election, though she’s eligible to seek another term in the Senate.

Rogers posted a draft version of the censure on social media, which showed that it was originally written to reprimand her for “inciting general racial and religious discrimination.” But that language was removed, as was a reference to her support of Putin.

Fann told the Arizona Mirror that she removed the language on racial and religious discrimination because some senators wanted to make clear that they support freedom of speech, but that Rogers’ threatening comments are not protected under the First Amendment.

Several members of Senate Republican leadership issued a statement over the weekend voicing their support for Ukraine and condemning Putin. Though it didn’t mention Rogers, the statement, which came four days after Russian invaded, was widely viewed as a response to her social media comments calling Zelensky a “globalist puppet” of the Clintons and financier George Sorors.

Rogers spent a decade seeking office, first from Tempe and then from Flagstaff, before finally winning a state Senate race in 2020, ousting incumbent Sylvia Allen in the Republican primary. She ran for the Senate in 2010, then for Congress in each of the four subsequent elections, twice seeking the seat for the 9th Congressional District in the Phoenix area and twice running for the northern Arizona-based 1st Congressional district.

During her years on the campaign trail, Rogers earned a reputation as a hardline conservative. But after winning her 2020 race, she started taking more extremist positions. She has embraced far-right extremists and openly identified with the “groyper” movement that seeks to push the Republican Party toward white nationalism and make its extremist ideology more mainstream.

Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, D-Phoenix, said the censure was a powerful message. But it was a message the Senate could have sent numerous times since Rogers took office, she said.

“I do want to ask, what makes this moment different? Let’s not pretend that this isn’t the first, second, third or even fourth time we’ve seen this kind of racist, bigoted and antisemitic talk from the senator. This is not an aberration in behavior. It is the default,” Rios said.

Sen. Raquel Terán, a Phoenix Democrat, said the censure wasn’t a strong enough action. She called for Rogers to be expelled.

There appeared to be little appetite among Republicans to make Rogers the fifth member of the legislature, and only the second member of the Senate, to be expelled. But there are other actions that could be taken against her. Fann has unilateral control over all committee assignments in the Senate, and could remove her from the committees on which she serves.

Rogers serves on the Senate government, health and human services, judiciary and natural resources committees. She serves as co-chair of the judiciary committee.

Kim Quintero, a spokeswoman for Fann, said the Senate president hasn’t decided yet whether to remove Rogers from her committees, but told reporters, “That’s been discussed.”

Rogers has become one of the legislature’s most vocal proponents of the false and debunked allegations that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against former President Donald Trump. She has made herself into a celebrity among Trump supporters across the country, raising $2.5 million for her re-election, a record for a legislative candidate in Arizona.

Last week, Gov. Doug Ducey drew national attention to the controversy surrounding Rogers when he told reporters that he still stood behind his decision to spend $500,000 from his political action committee to help elect her in 2020. Despite her embrace of white nationalism and inflammatory comments, Ducey said Rogers was still better than the Democrat she defeated, which kept the Senate in Republican hands with a one-vote majority.

The next night, Rogers spoke to AFPAC, which appears to have been the tipping point for many Republicans.

Following the vote, Ducey praised the Senate’s decision to censure Rogers.

“Anti-Semitic and hateful language has no place in Arizona. I have categorically condemned it in the past and condemn it now. I strongly believe our public policy debates should be about creating opportunity for all and making our state a better place, not denigrating and insulting any individual or group,” Ducey said in a press statement. “I believe the vote taken today by the Arizona Senate sends a clear message: rhetoric like this is unacceptable.”

Rogers was nearly drawn out of her legislative district but was saved by a last-minute change by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Rogers’ Flagstaff home was initially going to be in the new District 6, which is majority Native American and overwhelmingly Democratic. The commission made a series of changes to move parts of Flagstaff out of the district at the behest of the tribes, which were concerned about being outvoted in Democratic primaries by white voters.

After what appeared to be the final changes, Republican Commissioner David Mehl proposed one more change that moved another portion of southern Flagstaff, including Rogers’ home, into heavily Republican District 7. Democratic Commissioner Shereen Lerner claimed Mehl said he was making the change at the request of a friend. Mehl would not say who asked him to make the change or whether he knew an incumbent lawmaker lived there.

***UPDATE: This story has been updated to include additional comments.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Discussions are underway at the Arizona Senate about possibly censuring Sen. Wendy Rogers over her recent inflammatory comments and her speech to a white nationalist conference over the weekend, according to the chamber’s second-ranking Republican.

“We’re talking about that. We’re discussing that. I think it’s better to consolidate on what we’re going to do before we start talking to the media about what we’re going to do,” Sen. Rick Gray, the Senate majority leader, told reporters on Monday.

Rogers lashed out at the idea Monday night, writing on social media that she “will not apologize for being white. Hit me all you want.”

She continued: “I will personally destroy the career of any Republican who partakes in the gaslighting of me simply because of the color of my skin or opinion about a war I don’t want to send our kids to die in.”

The America First Political Action Conference, as the event is known, is an annual white nationalist gathering. In a speech to the conference in Orlando on Friday, Rogers, a Flagstaff Republican, called for gallows to be built to hang “high-level criminals” and “traitors who have betrayed our country.”

Wendy Rogers said white nationalists are ‘patriots’ and called for hanging political enemies

Rogers also praised event organizer Nick Fuentes, a known Holocaust denier with a history of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks. In a speech to the conference, Fuentes said people are comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler, “as if that isn’t a good thing.” Fuentes is a leader of the “groyper” movement that seeks to push the Republican Party further toward white nationalism. Rogers on Friday called him “the most persecuted man in America.”

Gray, a Republican from Sun City, said he had “serious concerns” about the clips he’d seen of Rogers’ comments to AFPAC, as the event is known. Her comment about building gallows were “disappointing,” he said.

“I can say I do not reflect her views. It’s not where I stand,” Gray said.

Rogers also raised eyebrows over the weekend with inflammatory social media posts about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some of which included well-established antisemitic tropes. She said Ukrainian President Volodimyr Zelensky, who has became the global face of resistance to Putin’s invasion, “is a globalist puppet” for George Soros and the Clintons. She added that he, French President Emmanuel Macron, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “all report to the same Satanic masters.”

“I stand with the Christians worldwide not the global bankers who are shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face,” Rogers wrote on Twitter.

“Globalist” is a common code word used by antisemites to disparage Jews. Soros and Zelensky are Jewish.

Senate President Karen Fann was more restrained in her response. She noted that she and other Senate Republican leaders put out a statement strongly supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, but wouldn’t comment on Rogers’ other statements or her participation in AFPAC.

“We do have a First Amendment right and anybody is allowed to say anything they want. That doesn’t mean that we, as a Senate body, agree with that,” said Fann, a Prescott Republican.

Fann noted that some members of the Senate are “are having conversations about the rest of the statements that were made.” She wouldn’t comment on Gray’s assertion that a possible censure could be underway, saying only, “We’re not even at that point yet.” She said the Senate will be putting out additional statements and taking action “as needed.”

She added that some senators were still largely unfamiliar with or unaware of Rogers’ recent statements.

“There are a lot of people who don’t follow Twitter and don’t follow the other stuff. I can tell you I have some members that don’t even know of the things that were said over the weekend. That’s why I said we need to have a little time so that people can catch up with everything that’s transpired so that they can make their decisions about how best we should handle it,” Fann said.

Some Republican senators, such as Sonny Borrelli and David Livingston, said they weren’t aware of Rogers’ statements and declined to comment. Republican Sens. Sine Kerr and Tyler Pace declined to comment as well.

Others were forceful in their denunciation of Rogers. Sen. Paul Boyer, a Glendale Republican who has found himself at odds with much of his party over his refusal to embrace false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, of which Rogers is a vocal proponent, or the so-called “audit” that Fann ordered of the election in Maricopa County, was the loudest voice among Senate Republicans.

“They’re disgusting. They have no place in politics, in civil society. They’re ridiculous,” Boyer said.

Boyer said Rogers’ comments were “specifically” antisemitic. Asked if he thought Rogers was a white nationalist, Boyer said she associates with white nationalists, speaks their language and appeals to them. He questioned whether a censure would have any effect, but said other Republicans should speak out against her and expressed hope that voters would remove her from office this year. He also took issue with her invoking Christ and the gospels in her speech.

Boyer also said he disagreed with Gov. Doug Ducey’s assertion that Rogers is still better than the Democrat she defeated to win office in 2020. Ducey’s political action committee spent about $500,000 to help her defeat Democrat Felicia French. Boyer said he’d rather have a Democrat, even though it would deprive Senate Republicans of their decisive 16th vote.

Ducey: A GOP senator with white nationalist ties is ‘still better than’ a Democrat

“I think that we’d still have to make persuasive arguments on the merits of any given policy,” Boyer said. “That kind of … rhetoric is beyond the pale.”

Sen. T.J. Shope, R-Coolidge, was also highly critical of Rogers’ rhetoric and her participation in AFPAC. In a tweet on Monday, Shope referred to Rogers’ comments about Ukraine as “bullsh**.”

“It’s completely, utterly bizarre. I don’t even know where that comes from. Talk about something that just doesn’t seem rational at all, as far as thought. Nothing positive to say, that’s for sure,” he told reporters on Monday.

Shope wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’d rather have a Democrat than Rogers, but said, “I would rather have somebody filling that seat that I’m not going to have to explain myself away on a daily basis.”

Shope wouldn’t comment on how he would vote on a hypothetical censure motion against Rogers. He noted that he was the chairman of the House ethics committee and has “tremendous respect” for the process. He said he would have to look at whatever information was presented to him and doesn’t want to “go out of turn.”

Rogers, who boasted in her AFPAC speech that she didn’t run from criticism, would not speak with reporters on the Senate floor on Monday.

Republicans in Arizona were largely silent about Rogers on Monday. But GOP members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who are derided by Rogers’ wing of the party over false election conspiracy theories and debunked claims from the “audit,” were highly critical.

Bill Gates, the board’s chairman, and Clint Hickman, its vice chairman, issued a joint statement on Monday blasting Rogers for defending Putin, for declaring “that everyone who doesn’t support her conspiracy theories is a Soros puppet, a traitor or a communist” — Rogers has leveled similar criticism at the Arizona Mirror — and for embracing “anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic rhetoric.”

“The United States of America has always been a beacon of hope for those who believe in self-determination and self-governance. At this critical time, we need the world to see that we don’t just preach American values to others but we live them ourselves,” Gates and Hickman said. “Wendy Rogers does not represent American values or interests. I trust other business, community, and political leaders will publicly condemn her hateful, dangerous, paranoid, un-American rhetoric.”

Republican Supervisor Tom Galvin tweeted that Rogers “spreads anti-Semitic tropes in defense of Putin” and wrote, “The AFPAC knuckleheads are not conservatives and I’m all for cancelling white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers, and Putin bootlickers.”

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry also condemned Rogers for her statements.

“We hope it goes without saying that the Chamber vehemently condemns the anti-Semitic views espoused by AFPAC and its supporters. Elected officials who spread this kind of hateful and divisive rhetoric will have to answer to the voters,” Chamber spokeswoman Annie Vogt said in a statement provided to the Mirror.

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce helped finance Ducey’s campaign to boost Rogers in 2020. The chamber and a PAC it controls gave $140,000 to the governor’s PAC, which spent nearly $3.4 million to elect Republican legislators.

Nationally, several prominent Republicans took aim at two GOP members of Congress who spoke at AFPAC, Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Asked about Gosar and Greene, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “There’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism.” His counterpart in the House, California’s Kevin McCarthy, said it was “appalling and wrong” for Gosar and Greene to appear at AFPAC, and said he would speak with them.

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, referred to them as “morons.” And Wyoming GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney criticized members of her own party for not speaking out against them, saying, “silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling.” Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger said Gosar and Greene should be kicked out of the GOP.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

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Gov. Doug Ducey said he has no regrets about spending $500,000 to elect a Republican state senator with open ties to the white nationalist movement because it’s still better than having a Democrat in her seat.

“I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. And she’s still better than her opponent, Felicia French,” he said Thursday.

Ducey’s political action committee, Arizonans for Strong Leadership, spent millions in 2020 to help the GOP maintain control of the legislature, including nearly $500,000 to help Republican Wendy Rogers win the race for the District 6 Senate seat in northern Arizona. Rogers won nearly 55% of the vote against Democrat Felicia French, a victory that kept the Senate in GOP hands by a single vote.

Since taking office, Rogers become known for openly embracing the white nationalist wing of the Republican Party, including the “groyper” movement. That movement emerged after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, with the goal of pushing the GOP further into the white nationalists orbit and making the movement’s far-right views more acceptable to the American mainstream.

One of the leaders of the groyper movement is Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier with a history of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks. Rogers is openly supportive of Fuentes, and was listed as a speaker at his America First Political Action Conference III this weekend.

Asked if he’s still happy with his decision to aid Rogers’ campaign, Ducey on Thursday emphasized to reporters that he needs a governing majority in the legislature. Republicans have only a 16-14 majority in the Senate, which would have become a 15-15 split had Rogers lost her race.

Asked for his thoughts on the wing of the Republican Party that Rogers represents, Ducey reiterated, “She’s better than Felicia French.”

French spent 32 years in the Army and Arizona National Guard, where she worked her way up from private to colonel. A registered nurse, she is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and has worked as a medical evacuation helicopter pilot.

Rogers tweeted her appreciation to Ducey after a video of the governor’s comments began circulating on Twitter.

“Thank you, Governor,” she wrote.

Rogers served in the Air Force, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. She was one of the first 100 female Air Force pilots.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Shiva Ayyadurai, the subcontractor who conducted a botched analysis of Maricopa County’s ballot affidavits as part of the Senate’s review of the 2020 election, slammed the “audit” leaders as “self-serving grifters” in a new report.

Ayyadurai completed an analysis of the digital images of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County during the last general election. But before he explained his findings in the report he issued on Thursday, Ayyadurai took “audit” team leader Cyber Ninjas to task for alleged problems with the review, airing issues with the election review and disparaging those he accused of enriching themselves while ignoring critical issues.

The Senate hired Ayyadurai’s company, EchoMail, to examine digital images of the affidavits that voters must sign on the envelopes they use to vote with early ballots. His subsequent report and presentation to the Senate in November was riddled with inaccuracies, largely stemming from a misunderstanding of many of the policies and procedures used for signature verification, and demonstrably false claims.

In one instance, he told Senate President Karen Fann and Sen. Warren Petersen that some ballots were counted despite the affidavits not being signed by the voter, even as portions of signatures were visible on the envelope images he used as examples.

Prior to being hired for the envelope analysis, Ayyadurai wrote in his report that he and Cyber Ninjas agreed on a $50,000 contract in August for him to analyze digital images of the ballots. But he said at least 70% of the files containing those images were corrupted. Cyber Ninjas denied that there was a problem with the images and hadn’t yet made any payments on the contract, Ayyadurai said, so he terminated the agreement.

Ayyadurai said the “audit” team should have conducted an analysis of the ballot images before moving forward on other aspects of the review, such as the hand count of the county’s paper ballots, because it would have been a more cost-effective way to discover discrepancies or other problems.

“Millions of dollars were spent focused on the paper ballot counting (which revealed the numbers were the same) while self-serving grifters raised money for themselves and misdirected attention from real issues such as Chain of Custody and Signature Verification,” Ayyadurai wrote.

Former Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan raised at least $5.7 million from outside sources for his review, but has said the entire election review — which went months longer than expected — cost at least $9 million. However, Logan has refused a court order to turn over records related to the review, including documentation showing how that money was spent.

Even after he presented his findings to the Senate in September, Ayyadurai was concerned about the ballot images. He wrote that he explained to Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November that Cyber Ninjas never provided him with the ballot images. Trump, he wrote, asked, “What are ballot images?” Ayyadurai said he explained the issue to the former president

Ayyadurai wrote that he eventually obtained uncorrupted ballot images through Randy Pullen, a top official with the “audit,” and Ben Cotton, the CEO of subcontractor CyFIR, and conducted an analysis, the results of which he described in his report. Because of Ayyadurai’s history of false claims and inaccurate findings related to the 2020 election, the Arizona Mirror is not describing those findings without independent examination of them.

Though he wrote that he terminated his agreement with Cyber Ninjas to conduct an analysis of the ballot images, Ayyadurai noted in his report that the $50,000 for his work “has yet to be paid.”

Ken Bennett, who served as the Senate’s “audit” liaison, said he wasn’t aware of any agreements at the time between Cyber Ninjas and EchoMail to examine the ballot images, and is unaware of any agreement for Ayyadurai to conduct the examination he released this week. But he said that could have been arranged by Pullen without his knowledge. Pullen could not be reached for comment.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

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Five members of Kari Lake’s campaign team attempted to infiltrate planning meetings for an anti-sexual assault protest organized by a coalition of leftist student groups at Arizona State University, the groups alleged.

Members of the student groups became suspicious after the purported Lake campaign members made statements espousing conservative talking points and unsuccessfully tried to mimic progressive ideals. They also aroused suspicion by making out-of-place comments critical of Lake and supportive of Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner Katie Hobbs.

Students for Socialism ASU tweeted its allegations on Friday, saying the organizations involved in the protest planning had compared photos of the supposed infiltrators, who joined the coalition using fake names, to photos of Lake campaign team members from social media.

The alleged Lake campaign team members attended several meetings organized by Students for Socialism, Sun Devils Against Sexual Assault, MECHA de ASU, Students for Justice in Palestine, Young Democratic Socialists of America and El Concilio. The groups were planning a Feb. 17 protest against what they say is ASU’s inadequate efforts to prevent or respond to sexual assault on campus.

Daniel Lopez, an officer with Students for Socialism, said the five Lake campaign members attended multiple meetings without drawing attention to themselves, initially hanging out at the back of the meetings and saying little. New people attend these kinds of events all the time, Lopez said, so nothing seemed amiss.

“Until someone opens their mouth, it’s really difficult to tell the difference between someone who’s supposed to be there and someone who’s not,” Lopez told the Arizona Mirror.

It wasn’t until a Feb. 7 event where they gathered to make signs for the upcoming protest that organizers became suspicious. The Lake people began making comments critical of the People’s Republic of China, alleging that the communist country was trying to control the U.S. and was using slave labor. One of the five told people that her pronouns were “she” and “it,” appearing to mock people who specify their pronouns in order to be trans-inclusive.

And they began talking about how they were big fans of Hobbs and how much they disliked Lake, though the gubernatorial race hadn’t been a topic of discussion and had nothing to do with the anti-sexual assault message the organizations were trying to promote with their protest. One created a sign with the message, “Hey, students for Kari, you’re not welcome here.”

The groups that organized the meetings have pretty left-wing politics, Lopez said, and aren’t really involved in Democrat-versus-Republican “culture debates,” making the comments about the governor’s race stand out, especially given how out-of-context they were with the rest of the meeting. The groups began to suspect the new recruits were actually conservative operatives trying to infiltrate the group, perhaps with the intent of taking covert videos to discredit them or others.

“It’s really unclear what they were trying to do, because they didn’t do it super well,” Lopez said.

The groups held off on setting up additional meetings after that incident so they could decide what to do about the suspected infiltrators. Lopez said the phone numbers that the five provided to join the coalition’s internal communications quickly led back to their social media pages, which included their real names and identified them as members of Lake’s campaign. He said they also identified some as participants in a protest at ASU supporting Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager who was acquitted of murder after shooting three people during a protest over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisc.

Lopez said they suspected that the infiltrators may have been attempting to get incriminating videos in the style of Project Veritas. Rather than give them the opportunity to get any undercover video or claim harassment by the groups, they declined to confront the infiltrators directly, instead announcing on Twitter what had happened. Lopez said they also hoped to alert other groups that may have been infiltrated by the Lake people. A high school Democratic organization called the Keep Arizona Blue Student Coalition has since said they were contacted by the Lake campaign workers, as well.

“We can make assumptions about what they were trying to do, but we don’t actually know what they were trying to do. It’s like a very scary thing when you’re … a group of clubs and organizations that have undocumented students, you have students of color and you have students who face harrassment on campus,” Lopez said.

Ross Trumble, a spokesman for Lake, said the five weren’t acting on behalf of the campaign when they infiltrated the coalition of leftist groups.

“The Lake campaign does not condone any of these activities. The individuals involved will be disciplined internally,” Trumble said in a statement provided to the Mirror.

Trumble wouldn’t say how they would be disciplined or whether they would remain on the campaign.

Three of the five did not return messages from the Mirror. One immediately hung up his phone when he was informed that he was speaking with a reporter from the Mirror, while contact information for the fifth could not be found.

Students for Socialism said two of the five are ASU students, and that the coalition contacted university administration alleging that they violated provisions in the Arizona Board of Regents’ code of conduct for students that prohibit impersonation, interfering with university-sponsored activities, stalking and harassment. Two of the others attend Grand Canyon University. Students for Socialism said the group is asking GCU, which is a private school not bound by ABOR’s code of conduct, to recognize that those two students are in violation of several of those provisions.

Spokespeople for ASU and GCU did not respond to messages from the Mirror.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Nail-biter elections that last two weeks after the polls close could be a thing of the past under a proposed measure that could be on the November ballot — with the trade-off that Arizonans will have fewer options for casting their votes.

The proposed ballot measure is called the Easier to Vote, Harder to Cheat Act, though the title is a misnomer. Some of its provisions would make it harder to vote, and appear to have little to do with making it harder to cheat.

Republican election attorney Lee Miller, who’s working on the campaign, said the act’s primary purpose is actually to make it easier to count ballots quickly. Arizona’s prolonged ballot-counting process generates distrust and suspicion in voters, Miller said.

“What we’re really trying to do here — and I will acknowledge the initiative doesn’t come right out here and say this — what we’re really trying to do is put the counties in a position where 99% of the votes cast in any particular general election are counted by the time the sun comes up on the Wednesday after the election,” said Miller, who served assistant secretary of state under Republican Secretary of State Michele Reagan from 2015-18.

Those suspicions become magnified when leads change as the counts wear on, Miller said. That has certainly been true in the past two election cycles, at least when the leads change in favor of Democrats. In 2018, Republicans led several big statewide races on election night, only to see Democrats overtake them to win campaigns for U.S. Senate, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction and Corporation Commission.

The votes counted after Election Day are primarily early ballots that are dropped off at polling places on Election Day instead of being returned in the mail earlier. In both 2018 and 2020, Democratic candidates won more votes among those voters, allowing them to turn narrow deficits into victories.

“Sure, if you’re an election professional, you understand why that happens. But for the vast majority of the population, when they went to bed Tuesday night, they thought Steve Gaynor was going to be the secretary of state or Martha McSally was going to be Arizona’s next senator,” Miller said, referring to two Republicans who lost in 2018. “That causes people to go, what happened?

Some Republicans falsely portrayed the 2018 lead changes as suspicious, though there was never any evidence that the count wasn’t legitimate. Democratic candidates have historically always gained ground after Election Day in Arizona, as election officials count early ballots that have been dropped off in person, which typically benefit Democrats.

Post-Election Day gains for Dem candidates are the norm, not the 2018 exception

Republicans didn’t raise similar alarms when GOP candidates overtook their Democratic opponents more than a week after the polls closed in 2020. Democratic County Recorder Adrian Fontes led Republican challenger Stephen Richer for four days, falling behind over the weekend after the election, one of several countywide Democratic candidates who saw their leads evaporate in the days after the election. Democrat Jevin Hodge also led Republican county Supervisor Jack Sellers for more than a week before losing his race.

The proposal seeks to speed up the ballot counts primarily by imposing new restrictions on early voting, which is used by some 80% of Arizona voters.

Currently, election officials must receive early ballots by Election Day in order to count them. Voters have 27 days to mail them, and can drop them off in person through the day of the election.

Under the Easier to Vote, Harder to Cheat Act, early voters would have four less days to cast their ballot: Only early ballots received in the mail or at drop-off locations by 7 p.m. on the Friday before the election would be counted. (This wouldn’t apply to military and overseas ballots, because of federal law.) Miller said the goal is to give the counties several days to process the ballots and verify the signatures that election officials use to confirm voters’ identities. The proposal would require those ballots to be counted by 11 p.m. on election night. It doesn’t say what happens if any of those early ballots are still uncounted at that point.

Voters would still have the option of dropping off their early ballots in person on Election Day. But rather than walk to the front of the line at a polling place and put their early ballot envelopes in a drop box, voters would have to wait in line and show ID to cast their ballots, like people who choose to cast their ballots in-person.

This would eliminate the need to verify the signatures on those ballots, which can be a time-consuming process. It would also prohibit people from dropping off ballots for their spouses or other family members who live in their households, and it would do away with the ease of dropping off an early ballot by potentially requiring a long wait before the voter could cast their ballot.

State law currently gives election officials five days after the election to “cure” signatures that can’t be verified, but the proposed ballot measure would eliminate that curing period. It would also eliminate in-person emergency voting in the days before the election.

“If you want to take advantage of the privilege of voting by mail, we ask you to exercise that privilege responsibly and get the ballot mailed back in a timely manner,” Miller said.

Distrust in elections, particularly among Republicans, has become a major issue in the wake of the 2020 election, when former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters have spread lies about the election being rigged against him in Arizona and other swing states where President Joe Biden defeated him. Polling has consistently shown that a majority of Republicans believe Biden won through fraud, though there has been no evidence to back up that claim.

The campaign for the ballot measure must collect at least 237,645 valid signatures from voters by July 7 to put the act on the November ballot. It hasn’t yet hired any paid petitioners for the campaign — effectively a must-have for any successful citizen initiative — but conversations about hiring signature-gatherers is underway, Miller said.

Miller would not say who is funding the measure, saying that information will come out when the campaign committee files its first campaign finance report in April. He also wouldn’t say who helped craft the measure. He confirmed that the committee received input from Republicans, but couldn’t say whether any Democrats worked on it. He said he’s not aware of any county election officials who were consulted in crafting the measure.

One former election official, former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, took a dim view of the measure. Purcell, a Republican who held the office for 28 years, wasn’t convinced that it would actually result in final ballot counts as quickly as Miller said.

“What if you got in 100,000 ballots that (final) day? How do you get them processed and make sure they’re all processed by that Tuesday?” she said. “I’ve seen the volume that we’ve had in the past. I would just be skeptical about whether or not that would happen.”

Purcell also questioned why counties shouldn’t be able to count early ballots they receive after 7 p.m. on the Friday before the election.

“How do you say that’s the arbitrary date that you’re going to count somebody’s ballot when you’ve actually received it by 7 o’clock on Election Day?” she said. “I don’t see that as being legitimate, because Election Day is Election Day.”

Pinny Sheoran, state advocacy chair and president-elect of the League of Women Voters Arizona, said there’s no good reason to eliminate popular voting methods or to reject legitimately cast ballots that arrive at county election offices before the close of polling on Election Day. And the 11 p.m. deadline for counting early ballots, she said, is based on an “untested time limit” that doesn’t take into consideration the time it takes to actually count ballots.

“A catchy title that claims to make it easier to vote while ensuring the law will make it harder to vote is equivalent to ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ and will not fool the public. While making Election Day a state holiday is laudable, everything else in this act would make it harder for voters,” Sheoran said.

The one provision in the ballot measure that could make it easier for people to vote is that Election Day would become an official state holiday. Miller said that would provide more opportunities for people to vote in-person on Election Day.

The notion that making Election Day a holiday will make it easier for people to vote is an increasingly popular one among Republicans, many of whom propose the idea as compensation for either restricting or eliminating early voting. Several GOP lawmakers, primarily proponents of bogus claims about fraud in the 2020 election, have proposed legislation to create an Election Day holiday, often in conjunction with curbs on early voting.

However, elections experts say Election Day holidays are nothing more than a fig leaf that will do little to benefit most voters.

Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director for voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, isn’t opposed to the idea of making Election Day a holiday, but warned that it’s far from a panacea. Many people don’t get holidays off from work, such as those who work in retail, food service, health care, law enforcement, firefighters and others. A person who works in an office is a lot more likely to get the day off for such a holiday than a clerk at a Circle K, though the latter may have trouble getting out to vote on Election Day.

“The people who will benefit from Election Day as a holiday are often the people who aren’t struggling to find the time to go vote on Election Day anyway. And the people who are having the hardest time finding time to go vote on Election Day are least likely to be helped by Election Day as a holiday,” Morales-Doyle said.

The only people who would be guaranteed a day off to go vote on Election Day are government workers. Miller acknowledged that many people will still have to work on Election Day, even if it is a holiday. He said the campaign believes many private sector employers will understand how important it is and give their workers the day off. But the law wouldn’t force them to do so, he acknowledged, and employees who couldn’t get the day off to go vote would have no recourse.

“Folks still work on Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving, without a doubt,” Miller said.

The measure includes a number of other provisions. It would expand opportunities for county political parties to have observers for the processing of early ballots, verification of signatures, and tabulation, duplication and adjudication of early ballots. Within two days of an election, counties would have to post digital images of the ballots on their websites.

It would also prohibit the state and counties from disseminating voter registration or other election-related information in ways that intentionally targets people based on voters’ race, ethnicity, age, gender, geographic location or political affiliation.

Maria Dadgar, executive director of the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, worried that the provision would prohibit voter education efforts aimed at Native Americans, whom she said face greater hurdles and challenges than other Arizonans when it comes to registering to vote and casting ballots.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

The special master who is overseeing the examination of Maricopa County’s routers as part of the so-called “audit” of the 2020 election has selected his team of experts, and the Senate has provided him with a list of questions it wants answered.

The end goal of the examination is to see whether Maricopa County’s election equipment was ever connected to the internet, as proponents of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have insisted. The county has repeatedly denied the allegations, and audits it conducted of its election equipment confirmed as much in early 2021.

Some proponents of the false allegations that the 2020 election was rigged against former President Donald Trump have espoused wild theories that election systems in Arizona and other swing states that President Joe Biden won were hacked so that votes could be changed. Fann and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen subpoenaed the routers and Splunk logs as part of their “audit,” despite a lack of evidence that the county’s ballot tabulation machines or other parts of its election system were ever connected to the internet.

Two pieces of equipment that the Senate’s “audit” team said were connected to the internet were election department web servers that are supposed to be connected, and which aren’t connected to the election management system, the county said.

John Shadegg, a former Republican congressman whom the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Senate President Karen Fann chose as the special master in September, announced his three-person team on Friday.

Shadegg’s team consists of Jane Ginn, a cybersecurity threat analyst from Cyber Threat Intelligence Network, Inc.; Brad Rhodes, an independent cybersecurity consultant and adjunct professor at Gannon University in Erie, Penn.; and Andrew Keck, the owner and chief technology officer at Profile Imaging of Columbus, LLC. Under the terms of his agreement with the county, Shadegg had sole discretion to select the team, though Fann said in a press statement that all parties had agreed on the IT experts.

Shadegg is being paid $500 an hour for serving as special master. The Arizona Republic reported Friday that he has been paid nearly $17,000 so far. Each of the experts will bill the county for their time, and it’s unclear how much it will cost to examine the routers and the logs.

The three experts will answer the list of questions submitted by the Senate pertaining to the county’s routers and logs created by the software Splunk, which creates records of events and tasks that occur over a network in order to monitor security, troubleshoot issues or detect threats.

“Having been instructed not to release the questions prior to the IT experts being hired, the Senate is now submitting the list of questions provided by the auditors. We are hoping to conclude this part of the audit expeditiously and without any further delays,” Fann said in a press statement.

The Arizona Mirror spoke with two people with knowledge of Splunk and network security about the questions posed by the Senate to gain a better understanding of what information the Senate is asking for and the feasibility of its demands.

“A lot of the information they’re asking for is information that wouldn’t be logged,” Bryan Andrews, a network engineer, told the Mirror. He added that the Senate is asking for “good diagnostic information,” but it wouldn’t likely have a “smoking gun.”

Many of the logs the Senate would likely receive will be encrypted, as well, meaning they will be impossible to interpret and the Senate will only be able to see that a request happened and no other information. Additionally, Splunk does not log information such as IP or netflow data.

“They want to pretend that there was a wiretap and that they can pull all the records,” Andrews said.

The logs will only show certain information, such as failed log-in attempts, communications between servers or if a cable is unplugged. It won’t show if a hacker or nefarious state actor tried to hack the county’s system, Andrews said.

Andrews also said that it is possible that other county information could be contained among the logs, as generally Splunk is all contained in one account that is shared across one system which is then split into different “silos” so you “have to be very careful when giving someone access,” Andrews said.

One cybersecurity expert said there will be reams of data to sift through, and that it will be easy to cherry-pick data and present it as evidence of something that can’t be proven.

“It’s going to generate a ton of data — just as if you were going to record somebody’s conversations for a week,” Jason Hernandez, an independent security researcher, said. “There would absolutely be something that would be taken out of context and make somebody look bad.”

Hernandez said he doesn’t believe the process will be overly burdensome on the county to produce, and that examining the Splunk logs for security reasons on occasion may not be entirely a bad idea. However, in light of the context of the request, Hernandez said it makes things feel different.

“If it wasn’t for the context and craziness, this would be something that is more routine — that would be a chore,” he said.

County officials turned over most of the materials that Fann and Petersen sought after a judge ruled that the subpoenas were valid. But the county balked at providing access to the routers, which service all county departments, and which contain information that goes far beyond the 2020 election. The agreement they reached in September keeps the routers in the county’s possession and out of the audit team’s hands, and protects the confidential information.

“I’m encouraged to hear that Special Master Shadegg has hired the IT team he needs to answer Senate questions about the November 2020 election and the county’s routers,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates said in a written statement. “We look forward to continued cooperation with Mr. Shadegg and the Senate.”

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Lawmakers would have the power to reject election results under a sweeping piece of legislation that would make seismic changes to the way elections are conducted in Arizona.

Rep. John Fillmore’s House Bill 2596 would eliminate no-excuse early voting, which is used by the overwhelming majority of Arizona voters, and would require that all ballots not only be counted by hand, but that those tallies be completed within 24 hours of the polls closing on Election Day, among other changes.

Perhaps the biggest change, however, is that the legislature would be empowered to accept or reject election results in legislative, congressional and statewide races. Under the proposed law, the legislature would be required to call itself into session after an election to “review the ballot tabulating process.” Once that review is completed, lawmakers would decide whether to accept or reject the results. If the legislature rejects the results, any qualified voter can go to court to ask a judge to order a new election.

Election experts found that provision to be highly problematic.

“It’s terrifying,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former deputy of elections in Arapahoe County, Colo., who is now a partner at The Elections Group, a consulting outfit.

Fillmore, a Republican from Apache Junction, said the proposal is simply a matter of oversight. It’s not the legislature that would overturn an election, he said. If the legislature found “obvious fraud” and rejected the election’s results, the courts would have to overturn them. And if a judge refused to order a new election, “then we’re just going to have to shut up and deal with it.”

But that’s not what the language of Fillmore’s bill says. The measure doesn’t require the legislature to have a specific reason to reject an election’s results. And it doesn’t explicitly say what happens if the legislature rejects an election but the courts won’t order a new one. The bill also doesn’t say what factors a judge must consider when weighing a request, or whether there would be a re-vote on all races or just specific ones.

Fillmore suggested that it wouldn’t be reasonable to stipulate all the potential reasons why lawmakers might reject election results. And he said the legislature would use that power with discretion.

“Do you think we come down here just to create havoc? No,” Fillmore said. “I don’t think, when you have 60 members down here, that we’re going to arbitrarily say, ‘Well we disagree.’”

Tammy Patrick, the former head of federal compliance at the Maricopa County Elections Department who is now the senior advisor for elections at the nonprofit Democracy Fund, said the proposal is part of a troubling trend in which “anti-democratic forces” in state legislatures across the country are sponsoring bills that would allow lawmakers to subvert the will of the people. The movement arose in response to bogus claims made by former President Donald Trump and some of his allies that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

If the bill is intended to only allow the legislature to reject election results if it finds fraud, then the bill needs to be explicit about that, Patrick said. But there are already remedies if fraud is suspected in an election: people can go to court if there’s evidence of malfeasance.

Numerous lawsuits were filed challenging the November 2020 election results in Arizona, but none were successful — and few alleged that the results were affected by fraud. All of those lawsuits, including those that did claim fraud, were dismissed for a lack of evidence.

On a global level, Patrick said laws like these are reminiscent of dictatorships with “sham democracies.”

“This type of activity, when you look at it all in one comprehensive way, it’s anti-democratic, it’s authoritarian, and it’s not the sort of activity and actions you see in a healthy democracy,” she said.

Fillmore’s bill also stipulates that the legislature may conduct an audit of election results for any primary or general election. That raises the question of what exactly must be done to demonstrate fraud. Senate President Karen Fann ordered an audit of the 2020 general election results in Maricopa County, but hired unqualified and biased contractors who had participated in efforts to overturn the election and to prove that Trump was cheated out of his re-election. The “audit” team alleged that it found dozens of issues, including thousands of potentially illegal votes, but acknowledged that there might be legitimate explanations. The county has mostly debunked the audit team’s findings.

House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, D-Phoenix, predicted that if his Republican colleagues got the power to reject election results, they’d do so based simply on which results they liked or didn’t like. He noted that the “audit” recounted votes from the presidential and U.S. Senate races, which Democrats won, but didn’t question the results of legislative or other races in which Republicans prevailed.

“We’ve seen a legislature and members who argued that the top of the ballot was fraud, but the bottom of the ballot was accurate when it came to the 2020 election. Their majority was OK, but President Trump and Mark Kelly’s races were inaccurate,” Bolding said.

No more early voting or electronic ballot tabulators

The legislation makes a number of other major changes to Arizona’s election laws.

Early or absentee voting would only be permitted for people who are genuinely unable to vote in person on Election Day, such as people serving in the armed forces, people who will be out of the state on the day of the election, people who are hospitalized or in nursing homes, or people who are visually impaired.

Counties would no longer be able to use vote centers where anyone can cast ballots, regardless of where they live. Instead, voters would have to go to a polling place in the precinct where they live. Counties would have to notify voters at least two years in advance if they want to change the location of polling places. Counties would also be prohibited from using emergency voting locations.

Ballot paper would also have to include security features, such as holograms or “identifiable sequence marking,” which has become a rallying cry for people who baselessly believe that counterfeit ballots were inserted into Maricopa County’s tally.

Advocates of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims have promoted a number of conspiracy theories about the machines used to tabulate ballots. Those allegations largely revolve around Dominion Voting Systems, the vendor that provides machines for Maricopa County and many other jurisdictions where Biden defeated Trump.

Except in limited instances when people must vote using machines because they’re visually impaired, all ballots would have to be counted by hand, rather than by machines. And the returns must be completed within 24 hours of when the polls close.

Elections experts say the hand-counting requirements are simply not realistic.

“This has obviously never been run by an election official,” said Ryan Macias, a consultant at RSM Election Solutions and the former acting director of testing and certification at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Counting that many ballots by hand would take an extraordinarily long time, and would be nearly impossible to do in 24 hours. Macias noted that Cyber Ninjas, the company that led Fann’s so-called audit, took several months to count only two races on about 2.1 million ballots. Arizona’s ballots, by comparison, have dozens of races and questions. Patrick said the judicial retention elections that Arizonans vote in could add months to the tally.

“Cyber Ninjas couldn’t do it in eight weeks in a single county with two races,” Macias said.

Elections experts also emphasized that hand counts are simply less accurate than machine counts. Human beings are simply bad at tedious, repetitive tasks, Morrell said.

“There’s a reason why we sort of moved to voter technology. It’s both accuracy and efficiency,” she said.

Fillmore was unpersuaded by such arguments.

“I don’t care what election officials are going to tell me. I’ll tell you what I know in my heart. I know that if you were the election officer and you held that election in your precinct, and those are the people that are going to be counting, I trust you,” he said.

Some 80% of Arizona voters use the state’s early voting system, in which voters receive a ballot in the mail, with the option of mailing it back or dropping it off in person at a polling place. In Maricopa County, nearly 92% of voters used early ballots in the 2020 general election.

But just because the majority of people do something doesn’t necessarily make it right, Fillmore argued, saying early voting opens the door to potential election fraud.

Election officials and experts argue that early voting is highly secure. Voters must sign the envelopes used to return their early ballots, and those signatures must be verified by trained election workers before the ballots are counted. Instances of fraud in systems with early voting, even in states and other jurisdictions that conduct all of their elections by mail, are rare. It’s unclear if Arizona ever prosecuted someone for illegally voting with another person’s early ballot until last year, despite using no-excuse early voting for decades.

How much support Fillmore’s bill will get remains to be seen. Democrats are staunchly opposed to the types of proposals he included in HB2596, and Republicans have only a one-vote majority in each legislative chamber, meaning they can’t afford to lose a single member on a party-line vote.

That is likely to be a problem. In the Senate, Republican Paul Boyer has expressed skepticism about many of the changes his GOP colleagues want to make, especially proposals based on the findings of the so-called audit, of which he’s been critical. And he won’t vote to eliminate early voting.

“Here’s my approach generally – I’m not going to vote for anything to legitimize the Cyber Ninjas audit,” Boyer told the Arizona Mirror before Fillmore introduced his bill.

Even some audit supporters who have pushed new election restrictions based on the findings have expressed skepticism about getting rid of early voting.

“One day? See, now that restricts voting,” Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, told Patriot Party activist Daniel McCarthy in a video posted on Twitter on Jan. 10, the day the 2022 legislative session began.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd that espoused conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 presidential vote and touted the largely debunked findings of the so-called Maricopa County “audit,” the Senate Government Committee on Monday advanced a slew of bills aimed at curbing or alleviating concerns about election fraud in Arizona, despite little evidence of such incidents.

The committee passed seven bills that proponents described as measures that would prevent fraud in future elections. The legislation included laws mandating counter-fraud security measures, probes into people who can’t prove their citizenship when they register to vote, reviews of election equipment, prohibiting all-mail balloting, changing mandatory recount rules and requiring images of all ballots to be posted online.

All seven of the bills passed on party-line votes, with the committee’s four Republicans voting in favor and its Democratic members in opposition.

Dozens of advocates of the proposed laws packed the committee hearing room at the Senate, many of them making wild, baseless claims about the 2020 election or espousing conspiracy theories about the vote, such as that the count included many counterfeit ballots or illegally cast votes, throughout the four-hour hearing.

One woman, for example, claimed that county election officials didn’t send her an early ballot in 2020 because she’d voted for Trump four years earlier. Several people cited the thoroughly debunked “Sharpiegate” allegations, which held that election officials intentionally gave Trump supporters markers that bled through the paper on their ballots in order to invalidate their votes. Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich investigated the claims and found them to be without merit.

Many of the speakers said they’d worked on the “audit” that Senate President Karen Fann ordered for the 2020 election in Maricopa County. The findings of the review, which was led by unqualified companies and individuals who had been heavily involved in the effort to falsely portray the election as rigged against former President Donald Trump, have been largely debunked and discredited.

Maricopa County rebuts ‘audit’ findings, GOP’s bogus election claims

Among the speakers who falsely claimed the 2020 election was marred by fraud was Republican gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake, who has made bogus claims about the last election a centerpiece of her campaign.

“I’m worried about what happened to President Trump happening to me,” Lake told the committee. “This last election was shady, it was shoddy, it was corrupt, and our vote was taken from us.”

The overwhelming majority of the speakers supported the bills, though some questioned the motivation behind them.

“Conspiracy theories do not take away from the fact that our election processes are already safe and secure. The passage of this bill will sow the seeds of distrust in our democratic processes,” said Dana Allmond, an Oro Valley woman who is running for the state House of Representatives as an independent, of a bill that would require counties to post digital images of voted ballots online.

Sen. Martin Quezada, a Glendale Democrat, noted that more than a half dozen lawsuits alleging fraud or misconduct in the 2020 election were filed, and all were thrown out for a lack of evidence. Even Fann’s “audit” concluded that Biden had more votes than Trump, he said.

“Saying that the election was stolen — I mean that’s great for a campaign speech, but that’s not reality,” Quezada said.

Several of the bills included measures that were part of last year’s state budget but were later thrown out by the Arizona Supreme Court on the grounds that they violated the single-subject provision of the state constitution.

One of those was Senate Bill 1120. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, would require that if counties opt to use anti-fraud security measures on their ballots, they must use ballots that have specific types of features, such as watermarks, holographic foil, special inks, microprinting or others.

Conspiracy theorists claimed without a shred of evidence that counterfeit ballots were inserted into Maricopa County’s count in 2020, and the audit at one point inspected ballots for bamboo fibers and secret watermarks. Some claimed that ballots were printed on different types of paper, potentially signifying fraud, though no evidence of such problems has actually emerged.

“Any illegal ballot that gets injected into the system suppresses a legal vote,” Borrelli said.

Jennifer Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, said county election officials had concerns about implementation and logistics. She said counties would need a way to ensure that ballots complied with the 17 approved counter-fraud measures, and that they would need money to ensure their machines could read the new ballots. She also said it was concerning that the paper is only available from one vendor, an issue that Quezada raised as well.

Two of the bills, both sponsored by committee chairwoman Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, dealt with the issue of “federal-only” voters. State law requires people to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. But that requirement does not exist in federal law. As a result, people who can’t provide proof of citizenship can register to vote only in federal races, but not in state-level or other elections in Arizona. There are roughly 23,000 federal-only voters in Arizona.

Townsend’s Senate Bill 1012 would require the Secretary of State’s Office to provide the Attorney General’s Office and a legislative designee with access to the state’s voter registration database so they can investigate federal-only voters, and would require each county to submit an annual report to the legislature regarding those voters. Anyone who is found to have knowingly registered to vote despite not being eligible would be referred to the attorney general and the county attorney. Doing so is already a crime under state law.

Senate Bill 1013, also sponsored by Townsend, would attempt to eliminate the requirement that Arizona register federal-only voters by mandating that the secretary of state ask the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to include Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement on federal voter registration forms for the state.

Just because federal-only voters don’t prove their citizenship doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not U.S. citizens; it only means that they haven’t provided the proof of citizenship needed to vote in state-level elections. Election officials also check driver’s license records, jury duty questionnaires, Social Security records, foreign identifications and other records to determine citizenship for voters who submit federal-only registration forms. Like other voters, federal-only voters need identification in order to vote in person or request an early ballot.

Of the nearly 23,000 federal-only voters in Arizona, 7,628 cast ballots in the 2020 general election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Flagstaff Republican who has been a leading proponent of bogus election fraud claims, filled in on the committee in place of Sen. J.D. Mesnard, and was there to vote on one of her bills that the committee advanced.

Rogers’ Senate Bill 1133 would prohibit cities and school districts from conducting all-mail elections. State law has permitted mail-only balloting in off-year elections — the only elections in which the practice is permitted here — for nearly 30 years, though the issue attracted renewed attention from critics last year due to concerns over mail-in voting that were largely spurred by false allegations Trump made during his 2020 campaign.

Senate Bill 1008 would loosen the rules for when a full recount of a race must be conducted. Currently, state law only mandates a recount if the margin of victory is within either one-tenth of a percentage point, or within 10-200 votes, depending on what kind of race it is. The bill, sponsored by Sen Michelle Ugenti-Rita, would lower the threshold to a half percentage point.

Had the proposed threshold been in place in 2020, the state would have had to recount the presidential race, which President Joe Biden won by 10,457 votes.

Like the other bills the committee heard on Monday, SB1008 passed on a party-line vote, with the panel’s four Republican members voting in favor and the three Democrats voting against it.

Gov. Doug Ducey is supportive of expanding the recount threshold, his staff told reporters earlier this month. The governor rarely takes a position on legislation until he’s acted on it, and has repeatedly defended the security and integrity of Arizona’s election system, though he hasn’t closed the door to changes to the law.

Ugenti-Rita ran a similar bill last year, but that legislation died when Townsend, who’d initially supported the proposal, voted against it after Ugenti-Rita killed one of her election bills in committee. Townsend “killed it out of spite,” Ugenti-Rita told the Arizona Mirror.

Ugenti-Rita was optimistic about her bill’s chances this year.

“With the governor’s support and with the impact that bill can have on future elections that are very close, I think it’s going to garner the same level of support,” she said, adding, “I can’t guarantee.”

As to whether Ducey will support other election measures, chief of staff Daniel Ruiz told reporters that the governor will let that process play out in the legislature.

“The governor’s going to prioritize adjusting the recount threshold,” he said.

Senate Bill 1119 would require counties to make available to the public digital images of all ballots cast in an election. Those ballots would have to be searchable by precinct.

“We vote in private but we count in public,” said Borrelli, the bill’s sponsor, who emphasized that people would be unable to tie ballots to individual voters.

Townsend said the bill would reduce conspiracy theories by making the tally publicly available. She said Maricopa County’s ballot tabulation machines, which are provided by Dominion Voting Systems, already have the capability of creating digital images of the ballots.

Marson said the counties had some concerns they hoped to see addressed. One of their concerns was that they be released from any legal liabilities that may arise. She noted that some people sign their names or even write their names and addresses on ballots, which would eliminate the secrecy of their ballots. But the counties don’t want to redact anything, she said, which could give people the impression that they were hiding something.

“Redaction is tough. Redaction is a whole other ball of wax that’s not really contemplated right now. We don’t want to be in the business of redaction,” Marson said.

Sen. Teresa Hatathlie, D-Coal Mine Canyon, said the counties would have to engage in voter education if the bill passes into law to ensure that people know any personal information they write on their ballots will be made public.

That bill didn’t get any Democratic backing on the committee but had support from an unlikely source, former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes. Fontes, a Democrat who is now running for secretary of state, issued a statement earlier this month supporting an identical proposal sponsored in the House by Rep. Mark Finchem.

Fontes said that, although Finchem and other right-wing election conspiracy theorists believe the measure will “find their invisible smoking gun to prove election fraud,” it will actually do the opposite.

“To be able to have a visual record of a ballot, while still respecting the privacy of voters, is a great way to improve transparency and accountability in our state elections. This will make it harder not easier for right-wing conspiracy theorists to sow doubt about our elections,” he said in a written statement backing the bill.

Several committee members left before they’d finished with the day’s agenda, depriving the committee of a quorum and forcing Townsend to hold several bills for hearings next week. In addition to the committee’s regularly scheduled hearing on Monday, she said she hopes to hold an additional special hearing to help get through all the legislation she wants to hear.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

The most impressive fundraising number in the 2022 election cycle belongs not to a gubernatorial candidate or U.S. Senate hopeful, but to a first-term state senator seeking re-election.

Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Flagstaff Republican who has made herself into a national figure by falsely claiming the 2020 election was rigged against former President Donald Trump, announced on Thursday that she raised nearly $2.5 million last year. According to online campaign finance records, which go back to 2002, the figure is a new legislative record, shattering the mark set by Rogers herself in 2020.

The majority of Rogers’ contributions are under $100 and from out of state. Rogers tweeted that she received contributions from more than 40,000 people.

Rogers has spent nearly $900,000, and has nearly $1.6 million on hand going into the election year.

Since her election to the Senate in 2020, Rogers, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot who reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, has become a mainstay on the national pro-Trump circuit. She has become a leader in the movement touting bogus allegations that election fraud cost him his re-election and promoting the so-called “audit” that Senate President Karen Fann initiated of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

She often draws attention to herself with her combative style and outlandish statements and actions, such as calling for a return of McCarthyism, attending a convention promoting the QAnon movement and warning of the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists that claims white Americans are being intentionally replaced with non-white immigrants.

Rogers went on a nationwide tour last year to promote the baseless conspiracy theory, spread by Trump, that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has endorsed her campaign.

After a decade of unsuccessful campaigns, Rogers finally won her first elective office in 2020, ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Sylvia Allen in the GOP primary and winning a hotly contested general election in her northern Arizona-based legislative district. She lost her first campaign for state Senate in 2010 and lost four consecutive congressional races over the subsequent eight years.

In her 2020 Senate campaign, Rogers became the first legislative candidate in Arizona history to raise $1 million, a mark she shattered in 2021. Few statewide candidates in Arizona have ever raised as much as Rogers has for her first Senate re-election campaign. Prior to the 2022 election cycle, only six state-level candidates in Arizona had ever raised as much for their entire campaigns.

This election cycle, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the governor’s race, raised $2.9 million, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson raised $3.7 million, half of which was her own money. Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Gaynor announced that he raised $5 million last year, but his campaign refused to say how much of that was from the wealthy businessman himself.

The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission drew Rogers into the new District 7, which runs from southern Flagstaff through Gila County and into eastern Pinal County. She is now in the same district as fellow Republican Sen. Kelly Townsend, who lives in Apache Junction, setting up what could be the hottest legislative race of 2022.

Rogers may not have to face Townsend in the primary, however. Townsend filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run in the new 6th Congressional District. Townsend has not yet filed a statement of interest with the Secretary of State’s Office, which she must do before collecting signatures to get her name on the ballot for the 6th District.

Townsend would not confirm which office she’s running for. She told the Arizona Mirror that she’ll have more information to share about her plans on Monday.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Nearly every claim that Senate President Karen Fann’s so-called audit team made about the 2020 general election was either inaccurate, misleading or patently false, according to a long-awaited rebuttal by Maricopa County.

County officials have spent months since the audit team presented its findings in September examining the allegations, which included tens of thousands of possibly questionable votes, ballot tabulation equipment being improperly connected to the internet, illegally deleted files and early ballots being inappropriately counted despite missing signatures from voters.

During a four-hour presentation to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and county Recorder Stephen Richer on Wednesday, members of the county’s elections team laid out a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by audit team leader Cyber Ninjas and other members of the team that spent six months hand-counting ballots, examining machinery and probing other aspects of the 2020 election. The county also issued a 93-page report, titled “Correcting the Record: Maricopa County’s In-Depth Analysis of the Senate Inquiry,” on its findings.

Fann initiated the audit in response to the false claims that former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters spread that the 2020 election was rigged against him. She hired Cyber Ninjas despite the company’s lack of relevant qualifications or experience with election-related matters. Doug Logan, the company’s founder and the leader of the audit team, had promoted those false claims and had even actively participated in the “Stop the Steal” movement that attempted to legitimate those allegations and overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

“I wish that we were not still here discussing the 2020 election, but, unfortunately, the state Senate, working with their contractors, have decided to go through with a detailed process to come up with certain conclusions,” said Supervisor Bill Gates, the board’s chairman. “Now, it’s my hope that this is going to be the last word on the 2020 election because you’re going to hear the facts in detail.”

Of the 75 claims that the audit team made, Scott Jarrett, Maricopa County’s director of election day voting, said the county’s analysis debunked all of them, finding 38 to be inaccurate, 25 to be misleading and 11 to be completely false.

Claims were deemed inaccurate when the auditors used methodology that was either incorrect or faulty, or they simply lacked understanding of federal and state laws governing elections. For example, Cyber Ninjas claimed about 53,000 ballots were questionable because the voters’ addresses didn’t match up with voter registration records. But the auditors reached that conclusion using commercial databases that are often inaccurate combined with partial information about voters, Jarrett said.

Misleading claims were those which were technically true, but presented in a way that would lead people to a faulty conclusion, such as claims by CyFIR, one of the companies that was part of the audit team, that several pieces of equipment from the elections department were connected to the internet. Two were, Jarrett said, but those were web servers that are supposed to be connected. Tabulation machines and other parts of the county’s election management system are air-gapped, meaning they’re physically unable to be connected to other computer systems.

And claims deemed false were those that the audit team should have known were wrong, even with their lack of knowledge about elections. Jarrett pointed to the audit team’s claims that they knew the county used the wrong kind of paper because ink from markers that were provided to voters bled through the paper, part of the long-debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory. Jarrett said the audit team would have learned the truth if it had bothered to contact the company that manufactured the paper.

Though Cyber Ninjas’ hand count of ballots, which used frequently-changing methodology that didn’t comply with industry standards, confirmed that Biden won Arizona, the audit team made myriad other claims that cast doubt on the results. Much of the information that Jarrett and the report provided on Wednesday debunking those claims elaborated on information the county released last year in response to the audit team’s final report.

‘Questionable’ ballots

The audit team claimed that more than 53,000 ballots were potentially invalid for various reasons, including that the voters had moved and cast their ballots from addresses where they weren’t registered, that they might have voted in multiple counties or that they’d moved out of state.

Election officials combed through those records and found Logan’s claims to be almost entirely inaccurate. Of the 53,304 ballots that Cyber Ninjas deemed questionable, the county found 37 instances in which someone might have illegally voted twice — 0.069% of the so-called “questionable” ballots. The county referred those cases to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which is investigating the audit team’s findings at Fann’s request. The county also found 50 ballots that might have accidentally been double counted, the only one of the audit’s 75 claims that Jarrett said may not be false.

“This is the very definition of exceptionally rare,” the county’s report said of the finding that fewer than 100 ballots out of about 2.1 million cast were potentially suspicious.

The 53,000-plus instances, election officials explained to the Board of Supervisors, were the result of various errors by the Cyber Ninjas.

Jarrett and Janine Petty, the county’s senior director of voter registration, said Fann’s team made a critical error when it used a commercial database to verify voters’ residency information.

Every election official knows that those databases are full of inaccuracies, Jarrett said. For example, when someone’s roommate, ex-spouse or family member moves out of their home and files a change-of-address form, databases like the one Logan and Cyber Ninjas used will sometimes mistakenly list the other person as having also moved, creating a “false positive.”

In addition, Cyber Ninjas reached many of their conclusions based on “soft matches” — instances in which they erroneously concluded that two voters were the same person based on identical first names, last names and birth years. But in a county with more than 2.6 million registered voters, Jarrett said, there are going to be some errant matches if the auditors are only using those three data points. The county used seven data points to determine whether any of the 53,000 people may have voted illegally.

Ultimately, county election officials rely on voters’ affirmations regarding where they live, Petty explained.

“There is no real-time database that tracks the day-to-day movements and residency changes of a voter in our state — or in the nation, for that matter. We cannot deny a voter their right to vote based on the information contained in a commercial database,” she said.

The audit team’s ignorance of election laws also contributed to some of the inaccurate claims, the election officials said, a consistent theme throughout the day as they pointed out numerous mistakes that they claimed would not have been made by someone who was more familiar with the laws and procedures that the county must use.

Petty noted that Cyber Ninjas flagged some ballots as questionable because the voters who cast them had updated their addresses using U.S. Post Office boxes. But people can’t legally register at P.O. boxes and instead those voters would still be registered at their previous addresses, she said.

Richer, a Republican who wasn’t yet in office during the 2020 election, described the mistake as emblematic of Logan’s flawed analysis.

“That seems like something that anybody with any grounding in elections would know, is that correct?” he asked.

“That is correct,” Petty replied.

Technological issues

CyFIR claimed that county employees deleted various files from the Election Management System, and in other cases “flooded” the system with new actions in order to intentionally cause the system to overwrite old data.

Nate Young, the director of information technology at the Recorder’s Office, said the county examined versions of the hard drives that it cloned before turning over the equipment in response to Fann’s subpoena and was able to find all of the information that was allegedly deleted. The county has stated in the past that no information was permanently deleted, but rather was archived and preserved, as state law requires.

“This claim is wildly inaccurate and positions the topic in a way that is inaccurate to the misunderstanding of the Cyber Ninjas and the CyFIR to how they understand the way that we do what we do here at the elections office,” Young said.

The report noted that the county’s Election Management System database, which CyFIR’s founder and CEO, Ben Cotton, claimed had been deleted, was not only archived, but was provided to the audit team in April. In other cases, information that CyFIR claimed he couldn’t find wasn’t turned over to the audit team because the Senate never subpoenaed it, the county’s report stated.

Young addressed the allegations, which the county deemed false, that election workers illegally intentionally caused servers to overwrite their files by “flooding” their event logs with new information. The servers have a 20 megabyte storage capacity. Young said the county has asked Dominion Voting Systems, the vendor that provides the county’s ballot tabulation equipment, to request that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission allow it to expand the memory of those servers.

But Young said the audit team simply couldn’t find evidence of more than 400 of the alleged events that CyFIR said caused those overwrites. And he argued that it would have been physically impossible for election workers to create more than 37,000 events over the course of two days in March, as CyFIR claimed. The system has the capacity to hold about 38,000 logs, he said; the report said there were only 385 events logged during that period.

“We tried to come up with that 37,000 number, and we couldn’t,” Young said. “I’m still curious about how he came to that number.”

Jarrett also attributed some of the audit team’s errors to bias. For example, he pointed to allegations that the audit team had reviewed video in which they observed Election Department employees deleting files, a claim that elicited cheers from some members of the Senate during the audit team’s September presentation. In reality, Jarrett said, those videos only showed election workers preparing the machinery to be transported to the audit team.

“If you are biased and not using an objective process, you are likely to come to a faulty conclusion,” Jarrett said.

Early ballot envelopes

County officials also took aim at the spurious claims made by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and his company, EchoMail, regarding the affidavits that voters sign on the backs of the envelopes they use to mail their early ballots to the Election Department.

As with Cyber Ninjas and CyFIR, many of EchoMail’s erroneous findings were based on complete misunderstandings of state laws and election procedures, according to Celia Nabor, assistant director for early voting at the Recorder’s Office.

Ayyadurai did not understand that election officials give voters the opportunity to verify their signatures if election officials can’t do so, a process known as “curing.” She noted that a state law enacted in 2019 gives voters up to five days after the election to do so, and said the Elections Department hired additional staffers to cure signatures due to an expected influx of voters dropping off their early ballots in person on Election Day.

Nabor addressed Ayyadurai’s claim that the number of early ballots the county tallied was less than the number of early ballot envelope images it provided to the audit team, which EchoMail noted in its report. She said that’s true, but that the auditors didn’t understand that the county legally couldn’t turn over some of those affidavits, such as the ones used by voters whose registration information must be kept confidential, like law enforcement officers, judges and domestic violence victims.

Richer also noted that, in some cases, Ayyadurai showed Fann and Sen. Warren Petersen images of early ballot envelopes during the audit team’s presentation that he falsely claimed were approved despite having no signatures, when in fact parts of the signature could clearly be seen. In those cases, the voter signed the wrong line, affixing the signature instead to the area reserved for their phone numbers. Ayyadurai redacted that section with black boxes labeled “phone number.”

“It was staring us right there in the face behind the phone number box,” Richer said. “And, yet, they presented this as, ‘Aha! We found one that didn’t have a signature.’”

Gates concluded the presentation with an exhortation to the legislature not to take any action based on the audit team’s findings.

“I think it’s important that our legislators not create new election law based on the Cyber Ninjas report. It’s been debunked. It was not written by people who were experts in the field,” he said.

Fann said she wasn’t able to watch the county’s presentation and had no comment on its findings. Logan did not respond to a request for comment.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.