[AZ/USPOL]

I read 'protecting vulnerable voters' as 'voter intimidation'

spum you hear about this yet? This is the first time I've even heard of this thing

Hell, I don't even know how I got the email for it

BUT for anyone not familiar with our state's ignominious history of political one-upmanship with whatever ultra-red state's makes the news for shitty laws each year:

The Arizona "audit" of the 2020 election was basically a perfect storm of conspiracy theorists, cultists, government waste, and what I'd argue should (ethically) count as political corruption at a minimum.

It cost an obscene amount of money, well beyond the farcical estimate of like $100K we were given at the start of this thing, was conducted largely by poorly trained and poorly supervised volunteers, a not insignificant number of whom were actively searching for any excuse to overturn the results they didn't like.

And it was all overseen (to whatever degree that oversight existed) by a handful of people who had NEVER done any kind of work for any kind of election, much less audited one.

And it showed.

setting the money used in the audit and the voting machines on fire probably would've been less wasteful and more informative

Between making explosive statements like "the county deleted a bunch of voters" because they opened the wrong fucking file, changing their "audit" procedures on the fly (note: their made-up procedures were NOT the state-mandated ones), violating court orders, and everything else...you kind of have to try to find a way to accurately describe it all.

Like, the entire thing wasn't just your everyday incompetence or political gamesmanship

nope never heard of it

Hell, the dude leading the handful of guys responsible for the thing was even one of the people spreading the claim that the election was stolen and there was massive fraud.

It also lasted something like three times as long as they said it would, because just like with the cost in the bid they were repeatedly warned by people who actually do this for a living that their timetable was much, much too short to ever actually happen.

But every single problem caused by that cacophonous clusterfuck can basically be laid at the feet of one specific person. Who, as expected, threw the "auditors" under the bus once the lawsuits started coming.

And that person is their special guest, AS Senate President Karen Fann.

So I'm already expecting this thing to be like a knockoff of whatever Mike Lindell calls his anti-TED Talks, and it's likely to cause one of two things to happen as we approach the next election:

1. Some conspiracy-minded person(s) who spent too much time in the sun are going to go way too hard with this and commit crimes, possibly even dragging in a low level political operative or campaign worker in the process (and probably via something attributable to manifest incompetence, like maintaining written records of everything)

2. This thing turns out to have been put together by people who have at least some level of basic competence and/or with a team of lawyers watching their every move and vetoing the illegal shit. This would actually be less ideal, because it's going to result in them suppressing the vote even further the next time.

it'd be nice if it's a sting operation

We're already trying to legislate a few more extremely unnecessary hurdles into the process. Flooding the polls with an army of people doing everything they can to legally toss any votes they don't like would make everything worse. Especially not if they make every effort to drive away voters who don't look Republican enough.

(not to mention any voters they decide don't look white enough, but I'm sure there's going to be significant overlap between those two groups)

Former Trump chief Meadows' voter registration in qu...