The Arizona Republicans leading a controversial audit of the election results in Maricopa County, where Biden won in November, have apparently halted plans to visit voters in person to ask them about their voter registrations as part of the audit. Obviously, dispatching government-backed workers to stop by voters’ homes and question them about their registrations could easily constitute intimidation, especially if the visits were to be conducted in marginalized communities.
Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, revealed that the door-to-door visiting plans were getting put on ice in a letter to the Justice Department, which had “raised concerns” that the visits “could violate civil rights laws aimed to prevent voter intimidation,” as summarized by The Arizona Republic.
As outlined in a contract between a firm called Cyber Ninjas, which is helping handle the audit, and Republicans in the state Senate, those involved in the election re-examination effort had — at least previously — sought “to statistically identify voter registrations that did not make sense, and then knock on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address.” Pamela Karlan, who serves as principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has previously noted to Arizona Republicans in reference to their audit strategies that “[such] investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”
Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan “would not say during a press conference on April 22 how his company identified the voters it would investigate,” the Republic explains. Notably, ignorant so-called statistical analyses were a key feature of conspiracy theories from allies of former President Donald Trump surrounding the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, so the usage of an unexplained supposed statistical examination of voter registrations isn’t exactly a great sign. Although those involved with perpetrating these conspiracies don’t know what they’re talking about, they seem to have a just about never-ending stream of ignorant nonsense ready to go, making rebuttals time-consuming.
Biden’s victory in Maricopa County last November gives an obvious partisan pretense to the Republican-led audit effort. The audit has already included examinations of ballots under UV light to look for imaginary watermarks that some have alleged would prove that only some ballots — the ones with the marks — were legitimate, and it’s also included a search for bamboo fibers because of the idea that fraudulent ballots may have been shipped in from Asia. Firstly — why would a shipment from Asia be so quickly suspected of containing bamboo fibers? Meanwhile, more broadly — where do they come up with this mind-numbing nonsense?
