The lesson they’re taking from Arizona’s Maricopa County ballot review is not that they failed and should stop, but rather that they should try to avoid the negative scrutiny that hounded the Cyber Ninjas’ review and “do it better” in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, even if there’s no evidence of fraud, said Sarah Longwell, a conservative publisher and executive director of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together.
“It has nothing to do with auditing votes,” Longwell told CNN. “It has to do with creating a cloud of suspicion around the elections and keeping their fraud narrative front and center.”
The partisan ballot review in Maricopa County released last week reaffirmed Biden’s victory. But Trump and the Arizona GOP officials who backed it ignored that conclusion and the highly problematic nature of the review itself, run by a company inexperienced in election audits and which failed to follow standard auditing procedures, and instead touted other issues raised in their report — even though they were quickly rebutted by election experts and county officials.
The partisan reviews of the 2020 election results have come after a host of Republican-led state legislatures enacted restrictive voting laws, frequently citing Trump’s lies as reason to enact new measures in the name of “election integrity.” Eighteen states, including Arizona, have enacted laws this year that make it harder to vote, according to a tally by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said he once thought that it would require “some kernel of truth” for people to believe the falsehood that the 2020 election had been rigged.
“It turns out that no matter how much proof there is that the election was done fairly, people are going to continue to believe the…
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