J.T. Waldron
Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections (AUDIT-AZ) will appear in court for approximately 15 minutes to show cause in their lawsuit aimed at achieving a hand count of key precincts in question. In hearings to follow, AUDIT-AZ intends to show evidence of vote suppression via reduced polling locations, altered registrations targeting a particular candidate, unsecured vendor access and electronic vote-by-mail fraud.
If their hand count confirms a discrepancy, a revote of the Arizona Presidential Primary Election will be requested by Plaintiff John Brakey, a co-founder of AUDIT-AZ. Defendants include elections directors for 15 counties along with their board of supervisors, the Maricopa County Recorder and the Arizona Secretary of State, who has already responded with an all-too-familiar refrain for avoiding an adequate, timely remedy for election fraud:
The Secretary wholeheartedly supports efforts to identify problems that occurred in the presidential preference election and solutions to improve all state elections moving forward. But the Secretary must also follow the law, and the Legislature has not yet provided a vehicle to challenge a presidential preference election through an election contest. The Secretary would support a legislative amendment to remedy that oversight, but, currently, Arizona law excludes the presidential preference election from this particular form of contest. The Court should therefore dismiss the claims against the Secretary with prejudice.
So this recurring argument has been chasing its tail for years over the idea that potential beneficiaries of a compromised election system (elected representatives in the states and counties) are expected to somehow fix that very system that may have put them there in the first place. Ironically, the same people who have happily deferred to the legislature in the past have actively lobbied the legislature to remove any substantive teeth from Arizona’s hand count audit bill in 2006. Pima and Maricopa County Election Directors Brad Nelson and Karen Osborn both threatened to kill that bill if the sample size for the hand count was not substantially reduced. They also demanded that county elections not be included for hand count audits.
County elections are the domain of lucrative bond measures in Arizona. In 2006, a 2-billion dollar bond transportation measure (the RTA initiative) led to eight years of litigation and millions of dollars spent by Pima County to prevent a rudimentary, cheap inspection of the RTA ballots. This inspection was designed to detect print-on-demand ballots, which are suspected to have altered the outcome of Attorney General Terry Goddard’s 2008 hand count of those same RTA ballots. Goddard refused to check for these print-on-demand ballots himself, despite adequate warnings and ample signs that Pima County would compromise the stored ballots. In litigation, it was determined that Pima County misled the public about its ability to access the ballots in question.
In another incident last fall, Pima County was caught attempting to rig another bond election. This activity was discovered in a timely manner, so the rigging was averted and the bonds failed miserably. Establishment press and county bureaucrats were left scratching their heads over the failure of an initiative that was pre-sold to the public as destined to pass.
Maricopa County, the fourth largest voting district in the United States, has a history of illegally excluding Libertarians from observing the elections count, improper ballot security and conducting hand counts with a process that defies Arizona State Law.
Those incidents are only a portion of the history that AUDIT-AZ brings to the table in this recent challenge to make elections transparent and verifiable in Arizona. One notable difference with this lawsuit is that people all over the nation are finally starting to understand the extent to which fraudulent elections are affecting their ability to choose non-establishment candidates. They are finally paying attention to the state that talk show host Bill Maher affectionately refers to as the “meth-lab of Democracy”.
Concerned voters from all over the country have contacted AUDIT-AZ over election issues in their own backyard and AUDIT-AZ, despite their geographical reference, is by no means confined to the State of Arizona. Arizona’s Presidential Primary election is now becoming the springboard for intense scrutiny of elections throughout the nation.
Now we have a mainstream political party filing suit against Arizona elections directors and their supporting officials. After AUDIT-AZ filed suit to cover voter suppression, vote-by-mail tabulation fraud and faulty registrations, the Democratic Party filed a suit that deals only with the voter suppression. The goal of their suit is to get a more forgiving approach to the approval of provisional ballots, a proper allocation of polling places and a declaration of how Maricopa County’s practices violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Years of litigation via AUDIT-AZ uncovered a flippant disregard for constitutional law by the judiciary in Arizona. Let’s see how well that sits with the Democratic National Committee.
We should revisit our experience with the Arizona Democratic Party six years ago. The Pima County Democratic Party, at the behest of the statewide organization, pulled out of a lawsuit that pursued prospective relief for rigged elections. This suit asked the court to provide measures prescribed by experts and former elections officials that would improve the transparency and verifiability of elections. We hope that sounds familiar to our readers. When the Arizona Democratic Party abandoned this case to protect Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Terry Goddard, they inflicted a major blow to litigation that would have prevented Arizona’s 2016 Presidential Primary debacle.
AUDIT-AZ understands the full scope of the U.S. elections crisis including the influence of election vendors, fraud in the tabulation of elections, vote-by-mail fraud and a myriad of voter suppression schemes.
Here’s how you can support AUDIT-AZ’s lawsuit:
1. Be at the hearing. This hearing is open to the public and AUDIT-AZ needs you to fill this courthouse. Let the judge know you care about this issue.
The first hearing is Tuesday morning, 8:45 AM at
Phoenix, Arizona
Look for this opportunity on auditusa.wpengine.com
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