Arizona state Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) wrote to Arizona state Senate President Sen. Karen Fann (R) this Monday that his office’s investigation of a certain list of hundreds of potentially “dead voters” found just one. That’s it: just one.
The idea would be that dead voters’ identities were used to cast fraudulent ballots. A key tranche of allegations of “dead voters” that Brnovich’s office investigated came from the Cyber Ninjas-led and state Senate GOP-orchestrated post-election “audit” of the 2020 presidential election results in the state’s Maricopa County. That audit produced allegations 282 so-called dead voters had ballots counted in the 2020 election. “After spending hundreds of hours reviewing these allegations, our investigators were able to determine that only one of the 282 individuals on the list was deceased at the time of the election,” according to Brnovich’s letter. “All other persons listed as deceased were found to be current voters. Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”
Brnovich’s letter also addressed his team’s investigations into allegations received from other sources claiming widespread “dead voters.” Discussing those claims, Brnovich wrote: “Some were so absurd the names and birthdates didn’t even match the deceased, and others included dates of death after the election… [A]llegations of widespread deceased voters from the Senate Audit and other complaints received by the EIU are insufficient and not corroborated.” The EIU refers to the Election Integrity Unit at Brnovich’s office. Trump previously claimed there were thousands of dead voters in the 2020 presidential election, although it’s unclear whether he’s ever specified Arizona as a source for those supposedly deceased voters. The claim’s never panned out anywhere in the U.S.: in Georgia, for instance, four examples of dead 2020 voters were discovered. In all four instances, family members provided ballots to authorities in the names of the deceased, meaning there were no indications of a broad conspiracy. Trump claimed Georgia had 5,000 dead voters.
Brnovich — as of Tuesday — was running in the Arizona GOP primary for Senate in hopes of challenging incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. Trump endorsed somebody else in the race: Blake Masters, a familiarly antagonistic right-wing extremist. “At home, we see an unholy alliance between Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business, who collude to wreak havoc on our economy, destroy our border, impose their radically liberal ideology on our culture, and censor any dissent,” Masters’s campaign website says. What does that even mean? Do any of these people even know what they’re saying? It would be just as profound if Masters’s site said “Oscar the Grouch should immediately become president.”
More troublingly, Masters’s site adds that “Blake will lead as we fight for our culture,” meaning he sounds ready to target marginalized people — be they immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, non-white communities, or others — if they don’t fit his vision for Americans. Trump, meanwhile, is still pushing back against the 2020 election outcome. After the Wisconsin state Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled against the usage of most drop boxes for absentee ballots in the state, he called Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Rep. Robin Vos (R) to push for the invalidation of the 2020 presidential election outcome in Wisconsin, where drop boxes were used in 2020 and where Biden was victorious.
