It's Still About Suppression, Con't

Arizona Republicans found no election fraud whatsoever, but that won't stop them from passing some of the toughest new voting restrictions in the country anyway.

Arizona Republicans have put forth two dozen bills this month that would significantly change the state's electoral processes after the GOP's unorthodox review of millions of ballots affirmed President Joe Biden's victory and turned up no proof of fraud.

Proposals introduced in the state House or the Senate would add an additional layer to the state's voter ID requirement, such as fingerprints, and stipulate the hand counting of all ballots by default. Other legislation would require that paper ballots be printed with holograms and watermarks.

Republican legislators argue that the proposals, part an ongoing surge of GOP-led election changes enacted or under consideration across the country, are necessary to enhance election security and prevent fraud.

Official counts, audits and accuracy tests have confirmed the election results in Arizona and elsewhere without finding evidence of widespread fraud, and states with Republican and Democratic leaders have certified the results as accurate. Former President Donald Trump, who continues to promote the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, was unable to prove any of the claims in court. A coalition of federal agencies involved in election security, alongside representatives of election officials from each state, said the election was "the most secure in American history."

The Legislature began its 2022 session on Jan. 12, and many of the bills have already been referred to committees for consideration. They face uncertain fates, as Republicans hold narrow majorities in the Senate, and a Republican, state Sen. Paul Boyer, said he would block bills he saw as unnecessary or problematic.

Some of the bills appear to be tied to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that were elevated in the widely criticized ballot review state Senate Republicans orchestrated last year. Election experts said Cyber Ninjas, the company the legislators hired to examine millions of ballots in Maricopa County, had little to no experience with handling ballots, appeared to be looking for proof of conspiracy theories and misrepresented normal election processes in its final report as suggestive of fraud. Cyber Ninjas is accruing $50,000 a day in fines for refusing to respond to a court order requiring it to turn over documents related to its work.

Other bills, like one that would ban automatic voter registration from being implemented, appear to be designed to pre-empt provisions in national Democrats' election overhaul legislation, which has stalled in the Senate.

A Republican who has advanced false claims about the election, state Rep. Mark Finchem, who was outside the U.S. Capitol when rioters stormed it on Jan. 6, 2021, introduced and co-sponsored several bills, one of which would require that all ballots cast for primary and general elections be hand counted by default — a method that election experts say is unreliable and time-consuming. The state's millions of dollars' worth of ballot tabulation machines would be used only to verify hand counts.Finchem is running for state secretary of state, the office that oversees elections.

Another bill would spend $5 million create a special bureau to investigate voter fraud; still another would require voters to show voter ID cards and verify the cards with two of three methods — signatures, security codes or fingerprints.

 

So now Republicans want to make sure you need fingerprints to vote, which will of course create a public database of voters with biometric information that certainly would never be abused, hacked, or would never be prone to human error of course, and then require default hand-ballot counting, which would mean election results would take weeks to tabulate.

It gets worse, some of the requirements for paper ballot security technology simply doesn't exist.

 

Jeff Ellington, the CEO of the ballot vendor Runbeck Election Services, said he was also having trouble pricing out the proposed changes, although it was clear it would be expensive.

Runbeck supplied about 20 percent of U.S. mail ballots in 2020, Ellington said, printing 35 million ballots for jurisdictions in 22 states, including Arizona's largest county, Maricopa.

Ellington said that he had to Google some of the bill's requirements and that even some of his suppliers were befuddled by some of its requirements; he said it wasn't yet clear whether the proposed ballot design was even possible.

"Nobody's got that technology," he said of election vendors. "It's not readily available technology, because it's bank-level, Treasury-level stuff."

 

And all of this will end up costing Arizona taxpayers millions of dollars to prevent fraud that doesn't actually happen and could be caught by existing security measures.

 

The whole point of course is to make conducting elections as difficult as possible. Imagine if you had to give a retina scan at an ATM every time you made a withdrawal. Sure, it will protect your account from fraud if someone stole your card and they knew your PIN, but it would get obnoxious and burdensome quickly.

 

Now imagine having to get fingerprinted to vote.  The only thing they are doing is scaring off voters, which is the point. It's still about suppression.