Friday, February 17, 2023

Day 839 of GOP election denier hysteria (Trump Big Lie Clown Show Circus, Arizona ground zero edition)

 
Meet the stars of the
ATTACK Of the Clown Show zombies

AZ State Senate Majority Leader
Sonny Borrelli
Headline:  Arizona Mirror, 2/15/2023
Carroll didn’t attend the meeting to explain or defend his bill, but Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, said that the voter rolls needed to be cleaned up, repeating the debunked claim that workers during Senate’s partisan review of the 2020 election found numerous instances of ballots cast in the name of voters who died prior to the election.

AZ State Senator Frank Carroll
HeadlineArizona Mirror, 2/15/2023
The measure from Sun City Republican Sen. Frank Carroll, Senate Bill 1566, would cancel every voter registration in the Grand Canyon State on April 2 of 2031 and every 10 years after that, forcing all voters to re-register each decade. 
Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, told the Senate Elections Committee on Monday that her organization opposes the bill simply because it violates the National Voter Registration Act, which limits the reasons for which a person can be removed from a state’s voter rolls to a voter’s death, if they move outside of the jurisdiction or if the voter requests to be removed. [emphasis added]
That federal law also specifies that a voter must be informed prior to being removed from the voter rolls, not afterward, as is outlined in the proposed law.

AZ State Senator John Kavanagh
Headline:  Arizona Mirror, 2/14/2023
Fountain Hills Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, who sponsored the legislation, told his colleagues on the Senate Elections Committee that double-checking a small portion of ballots could help dispel some of the qualms from hand-count critics. The results, he said, would finally show whether or not hand-counts can be feasibly performed, and the data could be extrapolated to determine how many volunteers would be needed to recount the entire 2022 midterm election over 16-hour days.

 
Trump sycophant Kari Lake
HeadlineWashington Post, 2/12/2023
For two days, Kari Lake traversed this state with a clear message. She falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She baselessly insisted that votes were rigged against her in her run for Arizona governor last year. And she warned without evidence that future races will be compromised. 
“If you lose, lose with dignity. You shake the other person’s hand and walk away,” she told a crowd of approximately 200 at a reception hall on Friday, describing advice from her father on how to gracefully accept defeat. “I didn’t lose, so I’m not doing that.” Lake, who lost in November by more than 17,000 votes to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), is waging a new campaign without conceding the last one.

Kansas GOP chair Mike Brown 
Headline:  CBS News, 2/11/2023
Republicans in Kansas narrowly picked an activist who has promoted unfounded election conspiracies and promised a shakeup to lead the state Republican Party for the next two years, following weeks of infighting that mirrors the acrimony in the party across the U.S. 
Within 30 minutes of the change in the Kansas Republican Party's leadership, its state committee reviewed a resolution demanding that the U.S. House impeach President Joe Biden for "tyranny" over comments he and his aides made in the summer of 2021 decrying misinformation about coronavirus vaccines spreading within the GOP. The committee tabled the resolution until its next meeting.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo)
Headline:  Raw Story, 2/11/2023
However, as Gabbatt wrote, two of the speakers were unabashed proponents of the stolen election conspiracy theory which is at the center of Trump's third run based on his belief the 2020 election was rife with fraud. 
According to the report, "In Eric Schmitt, a Missouri senator, and Andrew Ogles, a congressman from Tennessee, AFP Action had invited two newly elected men who tried vigorously to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and seem to have little interest in turning the page on history."

MAGA AZ State Rep. Justin Heap
HeadlineWashington Post, 1/27/2023
State Rep. Justin Heap (R), who ran on a slate that included several election deniers, recently received an email from a lobbyist seeking to meet with him. In responding, he asked whether the firm she works for had financially supported his campaign. 
I need to prioritize which meetings I can take,” he wrote in the email obtained by The Post through a public records request. “May I ask you, Did Consortium [sic] Consulting donate to my campaign fund? And if not, why did you (or your clients) decide not to do so?” Heap did not respond to The Post’s request for comment. A Consilium Consulting owner declined to comment.

Maga AZ State Rep. Liz Harris
HeadlineWashington Post, 1/27/2023
Afterward, some Republicans accused Hobbs — who was previously the secretary of state and oversaw the 2020 and 2022 elections — of ignoring problems with the state’s election systems. With their newfound power, some GOP lawmakers have made clear their intent to double down on challenging recent election outcomes. State Rep. Liz Harris (R), a newcomer to the legislature who has spread election conspiracies, recently called on lawmakers to demand a new 2022 election. 
“I will now be withholding my vote on any bills in this session without this new election in protest to what is clearly a potential fraudulent election,” she said in a November statement. She has since cast votes and introduced legislation to outlaw early voting. She declined to speak to The Post.

AZ State Rep. Alexander Kolodin
HeadlineWashington Post, 1/27/2023
That afternoon, members crammed onto the House floor for the beginning of a new session, a pomp-filled ceremony steeped in patriotism — and partisanship. Members took turns introducing themselves and their guests. State Rep. Alexander Kolodin (R), a new lawmaker and an attorney who has represented the state party chair [and worked with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell] as part of the federal investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, said he would work collegially with those who want to secure elections and defend freedoms.

Maricopa COunty GOP Chair
Craig Berland
HeadlineWashington Post, 1/27/2023
The day was a preview of the fight to come this weekend when the state Republican Party convenes to select new leadership and priorities ahead of 2024. That meeting, set to unfold in the same megachurch, will test the power of new grass-roots activists versus a more tenured pragmatic faction focused less on litigating past elections and more on winning ones in 2024. 
By the end of the night, when county activists had to leave the church’s inner sanctum, it was unclear who would lead the county party, a frustrating end for some so focused on having elections that begin and end on a single day. Eventually, the ballots were counted both ways, and the race for chair was called for Craig Berland, who campaigned on getting rid of the machines. Berland was part of a slate endorsed by prominent election deniers Mike Lindell, the founder of a pillow company; state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R), the new chair of the chamber’s election committee; and Kari Lake, the Trump-backed GOP candidate who lost her own campaign for governor and has refused to concede.

Delusional GOP activist 
Georgia Cifelli-Amster
Headline, Washington Post, 1/27/2023
“If you’re going to tell me somebody like Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, you’re delusional,” Georgia Cifelli-Amster, 62, a GOP activist and business owner from Scottsdale told The Post. “And if you think somebody like Katie Hobbs beat Kari Lake, you are certainly delusional.”
Here's the message that accompanies Georgia's photo on an 11/19/2020 Facebook post.


And yes, she's still on Facebook.


Losing whackjob candidate for AZ GOP Chair
Steve Daniels
HeadlinePolitico, 2/3/2023
Upstairs, an activist DeWit defeated, Steve Daniels, was sitting alone in the balcony with his unsubmitted ballot on the floor beside him. “Machines are fraud” he’d printed over it by hand in black ink. 
Yet if it’s hard to hold your own elections when election denialism is your thing, DeWit was such a consensus choice that his victory was never really in doubt. It’s the elections Democrats won that the assembled Republicans assembled still have problems with.  [emphasis added]

Pennsylvania State Senator Cris Dush
Headline:  Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2/1/2023
In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Cris Dush takes over as chair of the Senate State Government Committee after pushing to block the state's electoral votes from going to Biden in 2020. Dush also mounted an election investigation that he hoped would use the Arizona-style audit as a model. 
He was appointed by the Senate's ranking Republican, President Pro Tem Kim Ward, whose office explained Dush's appointment only by saying that seniority plays a role and that members have priority requests. 
In the first weeks of this year's session, Dush has moved along measures to expand voter identification requirements and add a layer of post-election audits. Both are proposed constitutional amendments designed to bypass a governor's veto by going to voters for approval. 
Dush said he also plans to develop legislation to require more security measures for drop boxes and ballots.

Trump pet Kari Lake
Failed AZ GOP Candidate for Governor
Headline:  Washington Post, 2/2/2023
Headline:  Washington Post, 2/2/2023
Lake is not rallying her forces to oppose Gov. Katie Hobbs’s outrageously liberal budget or to win school board elections. Instead, Lake is fixated on her narrow defeat last fall. Like former president Donald Trump, who called into her rally to pledge support, she says she was robbed.dfs 
Lake told the crowd she has “mountains of evidence.” She claims that “300,000 ballots lacked chain of custody” in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, where she alleges the fraud took place. “A minimum of 140,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots,” which leaned Democratic, were counted despite “bad signatures,” she said. Meanwhile, 250,000 Election Day votes, which leaned heavily Republican, were “spit out and rejected” by faulty tabulating machines. The result: Democratic votes were overcounted; legitimate GOP votes were rejected. 
But none of this is true. Fraud, although hard to prove, is easy to detect. If someone were stuffing ballot boxes, the results would be way out of whack compared to those in prior elections. Most places have pretty predictable turnout and voting patterns. If an area suddenly turns from red to blue or has a huge, unexplained turnout spike, something fishy might have happened.  [emphasis added]

Arizona State Senator
Wendy Rogers
HeadlinePBS News Hour, 1/28/2023
In Arizona, Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers takes over the Senate Elections Committee after being appointed by an ally, Senate President Warren Petersen. He was one of two lawmakers who signed subpoenas that led to Senate Republicans’ widely derided audit of the 2020 election. 
Rogers, who has gained a national following for spreading conspiracy theories and questioning elections, has faced repeated ethics charges for her inflammatory rhetoric, support for white supremacists and conspiracy-filled social media posts. 
She now will be a main gatekeeper for election and voting bills in Arizona, where election changes are a top priority for some Republican lawmakers. Some want to eliminate voting by mail and early voting options that are used by more than 80% of the state’s voters.  [emphasis added]

Mike Guest
U.S. Rep from Mississippi
Headline:  HuffPost, 1/31/2023
Guest stands out for his particularly egregious record with telling the truth. In addition to voting to overturn the 2020 presidential vote, Guest introduced a bill shortly after the election raising concerns about mail-in voting having “many potential pitfalls that we don’t yet fully understand,” despite there being no evidence of any significant problems. The Mississippi Republican also signed on to a Texas amicus brief in a lawsuit urging the Supreme Court to reverse the results of the presidential election based on a lie about widespread voter fraud.

Mike lindell
Election Denier Extraordinaire
HeadlineHuffPost, 1/30/2021
The Republican National Committee is welcoming ubiquitous pillow monger Mike Lindell into the fold after his failed run for the chairmanship, despite his continuing baseless claims that foreign powers stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump by hacking into voting machines and his post-coup-attempt visit to the White House with papers advocating “martial law.” 
Lindell won votes from only four of the RNC’s 168 members in Friday’s election at its winter meeting, but he was nevertheless praised by Ronna McDaniel, who won her fourth two-year term, and her allies.

 

Tony Bair
Jackson County Delegate
Michigan GOP
Headline:  Michigan Live, 1/27/2023
Election integrity” is why Jackson County delegate Tony Bair will support DePerno or Karamo, he told MLive after a chair candidate forum last Saturday.
The election integrity movement sprouted from Trump’s false insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. Two years later, it can run a spectrum between denying legitimate results and just wanting fewer human errors and more security in the election process.

Billy Putnam
Candidate for MI GOP Chair
Headline:  Michigan Live, 1/27/2023
It’s not just Karamo. Candidate Billy Putman has said the 2020 election was stolen, and his co-chair pick – Sandy Kiesel – runs Election Integrity Force, which requested a partial recount of Michigan’s 2022 election by alleging systemic fraud.

Wildly unsuccessful gop candidate for
Secretary of State Kristina Karamo
HeadlineMichigan Live, 1/27/2023
Candidates running for MIGOP chair, however, have mostly stuck to one side: falsely believing Democrats are behind widespread fraud. 
We can have all the plans and have all the great ideas,” Karamo said in Jackson, “but if we do not fight back to ensure that we can overwhelm their cheating, we will lose.” 
Karamo lost the SOS race by more than 600,000 votes, the most among statewide candidates. Months later, she has yet to accept a defeat that will not change. 
“Why would I concede to a fraudulent election?” she said.

AZ Rep Rachel Jones
HeadlineAZ Mirrorr, 1/26/2023
“There’s a lack of confidence from some of my constituents in the election itself. I think the optics of that – of a secretary of state running their own election for governor and then certifying that election was a major concern,” said Rep. Rachel Jones, R-Tucson. 
In Arizona, secretaries of state oversee elections and give guidance on how they should be carried out, but the actual job of conducting elections — including counting results — rests with the 15 counties. Once all results are finalized by the counties, the secretary of state and governor formally certify the election. 
Rep. Melody Hernandez, D-Tempe, questioned why concern didn’t exist in the past, when, for example, GOP secretaries of state Ken Bennett and Michele Reagan were on the ballot in 2014 and 2018. Jones rebutted that times have changed since then and voter discontent has grown, citing a survey from partisan polling company Rasmussen Reports that claimed as much as 71% of U.S. voters stated they believed the midterms were “botched”. The company has been accused of having a GOP bias.

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