The “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 votes demanded by state Senate Republicans is the current leading edge of a major war in the Republican Party. Maricopa County’s Republican officials are furious about the conspiracy theory-driven, mistake-riddled “audit,” and it’s broken out into truly vicious fighting, with Republican state senators and the chair of the Arizona Republican Party having called for the arrest of anyone who stands in the way of the effort.
All this in defense of what a post-election audit expert said is “not an audit” after serving as an observer and seeing both sloppiness and conspiracy theories at play. But it’s not just Arizona. Just as Trump supporters spent the months immediately following the 2020 election bringing dozens of lawsuits aimed at overturning the result or at least casting it into doubt, now they’re frantically pushing recounts and audits done by their preferred list of vendors, where loyalty to Trump trumps experience at election audits.
In San Luis Obispo County, California, Trumpists are aggressively questioning the use of Dominion voting machines based on the widespread and baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion machines switching votes. That’s not the only conspiracy theory at play, either: One woman asked if the county’s top election official, a third-generation Chinese American man, is “in any way in relationship to the Chinese Communist Party?”
The furor in San Luis Obispo County is instructive because there is no reason to believe that anything was amiss with the count—a sample recount conducted last fall found just a two-vote difference from the machine count. In other areas, though, Trump supporters have seized on vote-counting problems that were discovered and fixed to insist that there are more problems just waiting to be discovered ... if only the right conspiracy theorists could be brought in to find them.
In Windham, New Hampshire, a problem with the count in a multiway race for state representative has led to an effort by Trump supporters to force the town to hire J. Hutton Pulitzer—who has worked on the Maricopa situation with a specialty in finding fake ballots by examining the paper they’re printed on—to audit the votes. At a meeting at which the town selectmen instead chose a qualified election auditor, hundreds of people showed up, drowning out the meeting with “stop the steal” chants and standing and turning their backs when the decision was made official. The chair of the board of selectmen characterized their goal: “If there’s an error found in the machines, you could extrapolate that to all the machines in New Hampshire. Then, it could go nationwide.”
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski lives in Windham, and Trump has weighed in to support “the great Patriots of Windham” in their attempt to find “the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”
There are also efforts to get Maricopa County-style audits in two Michigan counties won by Trump with more than 60% of the vote. In Antrim County, an election night error that was quickly caught and fixed has been offered as the reason for continuing suspicion, despite Trump’s win there. A lawsuit trying to force an audit has been dismissed, but the effort continues. And in Cheboygan County, a lawyer who tried last fall to overturn the state election results is trying to get a Maricopa County-style audit started. In both counties, election officials are Republicans.
”If you’re listening to these people, you’ll never learn the truth,” said Sheryl Guy, Antrim’s Republican county clerk in Antrim. “It’s very frustrating and exhausting, and there have been moments of being fearful.”
“My canvass board certified my November election,” said Cheboygan County’s Karen Brewster. “There weren’t any problems at all. I think it just had to do with the allegations from Antrim County. That’s what sparked this.”
But exactly these kinds of local Republican officials are coming under attack by their fellow Republicans because they stand by the integrity of the elections they conducted and reject conspiracy theories. The House Republican vote to kick Rep. Liz Cheney out of leadership for her insistence that the election was not stolen and the insurrection was wrong has gotten a lot of attention, rightly. But the civil war in the Republican Party goes down to the local level, too, pitting Trump loyalists against Republicans who have any values beyond Trump.
All this in defense of what a post-election audit expert said is “not an audit” after serving as an observer and seeing both sloppiness and conspiracy theories at play. But it’s not just Arizona. Just as Trump supporters spent the months immediately following the 2020 election bringing dozens of lawsuits aimed at overturning the result or at least casting it into doubt, now they’re frantically pushing recounts and audits done by their preferred list of vendors, where loyalty to Trump trumps experience at election audits.
In San Luis Obispo County, California, Trumpists are aggressively questioning the use of Dominion voting machines based on the widespread and baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion machines switching votes. That’s not the only conspiracy theory at play, either: One woman asked if the county’s top election official, a third-generation Chinese American man, is “in any way in relationship to the Chinese Communist Party?”
The furor in San Luis Obispo County is instructive because there is no reason to believe that anything was amiss with the count—a sample recount conducted last fall found just a two-vote difference from the machine count. In other areas, though, Trump supporters have seized on vote-counting problems that were discovered and fixed to insist that there are more problems just waiting to be discovered ... if only the right conspiracy theorists could be brought in to find them.
In Windham, New Hampshire, a problem with the count in a multiway race for state representative has led to an effort by Trump supporters to force the town to hire J. Hutton Pulitzer—who has worked on the Maricopa situation with a specialty in finding fake ballots by examining the paper they’re printed on—to audit the votes. At a meeting at which the town selectmen instead chose a qualified election auditor, hundreds of people showed up, drowning out the meeting with “stop the steal” chants and standing and turning their backs when the decision was made official. The chair of the board of selectmen characterized their goal: “If there’s an error found in the machines, you could extrapolate that to all the machines in New Hampshire. Then, it could go nationwide.”
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski lives in Windham, and Trump has weighed in to support “the great Patriots of Windham” in their attempt to find “the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”
There are also efforts to get Maricopa County-style audits in two Michigan counties won by Trump with more than 60% of the vote. In Antrim County, an election night error that was quickly caught and fixed has been offered as the reason for continuing suspicion, despite Trump’s win there. A lawsuit trying to force an audit has been dismissed, but the effort continues. And in Cheboygan County, a lawyer who tried last fall to overturn the state election results is trying to get a Maricopa County-style audit started. In both counties, election officials are Republicans.
”If you’re listening to these people, you’ll never learn the truth,” said Sheryl Guy, Antrim’s Republican county clerk in Antrim. “It’s very frustrating and exhausting, and there have been moments of being fearful.”
“My canvass board certified my November election,” said Cheboygan County’s Karen Brewster. “There weren’t any problems at all. I think it just had to do with the allegations from Antrim County. That’s what sparked this.”
But exactly these kinds of local Republican officials are coming under attack by their fellow Republicans because they stand by the integrity of the elections they conducted and reject conspiracy theories. The House Republican vote to kick Rep. Liz Cheney out of leadership for her insistence that the election was not stolen and the insurrection was wrong has gotten a lot of attention, rightly. But the civil war in the Republican Party goes down to the local level, too, pitting Trump loyalists against Republicans who have any values beyond Trump.