The Washington Post has a very good rundown of the supposed "election integrity" efforts Arizona Republicans put in place as the state began to trend less Republican in recent elections. The Post's story focuses on how Arizona efforts, led as usual by gaggles of conspiratorial incompetents, couldn't find a damn thing when hunting for supposed election fraud because there was no fraud to find in the first place.
Election "integrity" investigations in Arizona are in large part led by the very conspiracy theorists who themselves pushed fraudulent election claims; since they all turned out to be liars, when their claims were investigated the first time around, Republicans naturally gave them a government-paid do-over to hunt for the evidence they say is still out there. But people like Jennifer Wright, now in charge of "election integrity," were liars to begin with. They claimed there was election fraud because they didn't like the results, and every time they fail to turn up evidence of their conspiracies they and those around them suggest that it’s just because the invisible fraud-doers are just that clever.
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It's a flim-flam. These people are con artists, sucking up government resources for their own personal fame and benefit. Republican state Attorney General Mark Brnovich hired Wright to extend the fraud-o-rama circus as long as it could be extended, using his perch to shovel government funding toward advertising each partisan hoax under the generic banner of "investigating" them, and assuredly chose Wright as his ridiculous partner specifically because of her partisan, hoax-peddling nature.
You don't put a self-promoting conspiracy theorist in charge of "election integrity" unless you're trying to bury "integrity" in self-promoting conspiracies, and here we are. As for evidence that Wright is in fact a con artist using her government-sponsored post to push transparently fraudulent claims, the Post notes her office's repeated pattern of interaction with "people promoting false and disputed claims" of fraud.
Like, for example, the "Cyber Ninjas" proto-hoaxers claiming "suspicious" ballot signatures. The "True the Vote" hoaxers, whose claims have unceasingly been proven false—at least, on the few occasions when the hoaxers provide any details that could conceivably be tested to begin with. The laughably ridiculous "2000 Mules" claims of rampant ballot fraud based solely on the data-mined claim that 2000 Americans throughout the country were somewhere in the general vicinity of a ballot drop box—boxes which are by their nature placed in heavily trafficked public locations—more than once during the election season.
That last conspiracy theory was so profoundly Stupid that not even Fox News could shock its corpse into a lifelike twitch or two. It is a comical claim, a dramatic-music-attached discovery of the American commuter lifestyle turned into Republican apocalypse porn. But Wright's office is making inquiries into that, too, as part of an encompassing attempt to investigate every last election claim, no matter how obviously fictional.
And that's where the Post's reporting falls flat. It's a very long litany of the Arizona "election integrity" team's utter failures to find evidence of any conspiracy, any at all, related to voting. "Rather than bolster confidence in elections," the Post writes, "the absence of massive fraud has just fueled more bogus theories and distrust." The headline calls it a "cautionary tale" about Republican-backed election integrity units. The Arizona team has "found little fraud, sapped government resources and deepened suspicions," says the subhead. And the whole piece is premised as a "cautionary tale" for the other Republican-governed states, like Virginia and Georgia and Florida, that have launched similar election "integrity" efforts.
What the Post fails to glean from its own reporting is that the Arizona failure isn't a "cautionary tale" in the slightest. It is functioning as intended. It is not finding fraud, to be sure, but is still "sapping government resources" as it drags even the most absurdly premised hoaxes into its own supposed investigations. One does not put an avid conspiracy peddler in charge of investigating conspiracies in order to put public fears to rest.
Sapping government resources to deepen suspicions is the precise point of the Arizona flim-flam. Promoting unconfirmed conspiracies, under the banner of endlessly "investigating" even the silliest, will naturally make the public even more aware of each conspiracy being peddled—and will give government-sponsored backing to the thought that perhaps such hoaxes and fraud claims are worthy of public concern.
It is a con. A public grift. A straight-up use of public funds as political prop. It happens to be part of a broader attack on democracy itself, which seems of note; it is premised on earlier propaganda efforts that were long ago determined to be falsehoods, which seems deeply relevant here.
This is hardly a grand revelation. Republicans who responded to voters' evident tiring of the ever-showboating grotesquery known as Trump by insisting that Trump's loss could never have happened unless fraud was afoot demanded investigations, and turned up nothing. They put state government money and resources behind those investigations, and still turned up nothing.
And yet, in Arizona, none of the hoaxes that Republicans first promoted and then funneled money to conspiracy theorists to "investigate" in perpetuity are going away. That's because the investigators are appearing on right-wing podcasts, and their supposed new avenues of investigation are being promoted by right-wing hoax promoters, and all involved are dismissing questions about the utter failures of their investigators with new intonations that well now, they're still getting to the bottom of all this, and they'll be getting to the bottom of it from now until the sun burns out.
It. Is. A. Con. How convenient that state Republicans found a way to put conspiracy peddlers on the payroll, just as their previous funding streams were shriveling up. How terribly convenient it is that the result of this sapping of government coffers is to increase public distrust in our election systems, rather than ease their fears.
Just say it, Post. It is admirable for the press to point out government incompetence, when government incompetence exists. But it is more admirable to point out government corruption, when government corruption exists, and appointing a conspiracy promoter to a government position predicated on "investigating" conspiracies that all actually knowledgable and involved parties have long ago debunked goes beyond simple incompetence. These are actions of saboteurs.
In Arizona, the election integrity unit headed by hoax promoter Jennifer Wright is a con. They're getting paid to "investigate" fictions while far-right Republican partisans point to those investigations as new supposed evidence that the imaginary hoaxes have merit. It is a con, at taxpayer expense, and there's no way Mark Brnovich intended for it to be anything else when it was first formed.
Wright, it should be noted, refused to talk to the Post. That, too, should be lumped in as evidence of intent.
Brnovich, it should be noted, lost his primary to far-far-right neo-Nazi-adjacent hoax-burper Blake Masters in an act of retaliation by a Republican base furious over their leaders' unwillingness to arrest and imprison the real-world political enemies Republican elected officials have insisted were behind the purely fictional election conspiracies. The fascist base has grown tired of this nonsense about investigating and wants to move on to imprisoning their enemies, evidence or no. Wright's team is itself being mocked and sniveled about by Republicans who are outraged evidence of their internal fantasies has still not appeared.
It is not outlandish to suggest that Wright may at some point be the target of a Republican investigation into whether or not her office is just one massive public grift. Not because she was able to secure a government-backed position for harassing political enemies, mind you, but because if you insist that the evidence of election fraud is so abundant that it cannot possibly be ignored, the audience for your claims will naturally come to believe that you must be a special kind of incompetent to not be able to find any of it.
That's usually when the grifter of the moment gets themselves on a train and scuttles off to the next town, but that's been harder to do in the internet age. When the band instruments arrive, your suckers are going to want to start hearing music real soon now.
There is another purpose of election "integrity" units. The Post writers allude to it in Arizona, but another Post story centers it more directly. It's a report on the election "integrity" efforts of Gov. Ron DeSantis' Florida, where—as was widely predicted, after the state's Republican-led government worked to sabotage a 2018 public amendment restoring voting rights to most Floridians with felony convictions—election "integrity" consists of finding people who thought their voting rights had been restored and throwing them in prison.
The Florida cases are Orwellian in nature. After voters restored voting rights to Floridians via that 2018 amendment, and by a 2-to-1 margin in the voting booths, Florida Republicans tried myriad ways to stifle the intent of the amendment, but one of the most effective means was intentional incompetence. The Republican-run government cannot reliably discern, to this day, which Floridians have had their votes restored and which have not. The state government has attempted to wash its hands of the responsibility of telling you; you, as a voter, have to make the determination as to whether you are in the pool of those with felony convictions who are allowed to vote or are in the pool of those who still cannot.
That second Post report, from four weeks ago or so, is the story of those who thought wrong and will now be facing prison time for attempting to vote because they thought they could. Some were "led to believe by election officials and voter registration groups that they were eligible to vote," reports the Post. Those arrested had submitted their voter registration applications that were "processed by the state," reports the Post, which means the state itself checked whatever records it purports to keep and itself determined that they should be given ballots.
For turning in the ballots the state itself gave them, those voters are the targets of a new DeSantis-created public police force aimed at boosting election "integrity" by singling them out for prosecution. The goon squad is looking for prison time for people the state itself put back on the voting rolls; that is the most the much-heralded DeSantis efforts can muster.
But there is a point to it, and the point is the same Jim Crow point that southern states, especially, have long relied on even after the Supreme Court declared racism over and done with. Most of the 20 arrested Floridians are Black, reports the Post.
They now face up to five years in prison, reports the Post.
They are being arrested by armed law enforcement teams—even though four residents of the diehard Republican enclave called The Villages received starkly dissimilar treatment for intentionally casting multiple votes, notes the Post.
What is the purpose of throwing the book at Floridians with felony convictions who were told by the state they could vote and attempted to do so, only to have the state now threaten them with a half-decade in prison? Publicity. Fear. Intimidation.
The point of the DeSantis efforts is to put the fear of prison into any Floridian who tries to vote after having their voting rights legitimately restored. Oh, you can certainly apply for a ballot. You can receive one. You can turn it in.
And, two years later, you might find yourself facing three Florida police officers who will slap you in handcuffs and tell you you're facing five years in prison because you got it wrong.
How confident would you be, when casting your ballot? Would you risk it? If you were told during a voting registration drive that there was absolutely no question that you could now vote, would you believe them or hesitate? Could you do enough research to come to a definitive conclusion, in your own mind? When the state put you on the voting rolls, when the state handed you a ballot: Would you turn it in?
There you go, then. That is why 20 Floridians with felony records, "most" of whom are Black, are now the targets of an election integrity task force that's not nearly so eager to make an example of actual, intentional election fraud by the golf-cart crowd in The Villages. People in The Villages tend to vote Republican; Black Americans and Americans who can't afford to live in such places tend not to. And there's really no better way for Republicans to discourage those who might vote against them than to credibly threaten to throw them in prison.
The Post's Florida story was heavy on incredulity, with quotes from, for example, a University of Florida professor who nearly mocks the idea of these people getting successfully prosecuted for doing what the state itself told them they could—another example of why DeSantis and Republican lawmakers have a special obsession when it comes to stripping state university faculty of any perceived protection when challenging the party's political stunts. But throwing people in prison for voting when they thought they could has been a consistent move in states from Arizona to Florida to Texas. It's not new here. The discrepancy between sentences for nonwhite Americans who voted in error and Republican Americans double-voting on purpose is not new either.
We can bullshit our way around it all we like, but the press ought not to hold up programs with unabashedly racist outcomes and "critics say" their way through a both-sides take to the issue. Individual voters casting honest mistakes are not a crisis to democracy. Attempts to push known hoaxes as supposed "investigation" targets, entire task forces dedicated to singling out individual voters who had their voting rights affirmed by the state itself, before claiming error—those are attacks. Those are attempts to use government funding to prop up partisan means of discouraging Americans from voting.
Or, in cases from Arizona to Georgia, to pave the way for overriding elections based on claimed partisan "suspicions" about the outcomes.
We are really quite far along the path to fascist government. A far-right devotion to promoting hoaxes as justification for violating democratic norms ticks one of the most critical boxes all on its own; once you detach party action and reaction from the constraints of factual reality, you have violated the core premise of democratic government and made "consent" of the governed an autocratic fiction, something to be managed through propaganda rather than contested via policy. The election "integrity" movement currently shuddering through Republicanism is unambiguously based on known-false hoaxes premised, in various forms, on the theory that a worldwide cabal did something to our elections that has now rendered them invalid.
There is no evidence being presented because there is none to present, but the lack of evidence is itself being used to justify more and more egregious moves to make voting more difficult and, when possible, more dangerous.
Is that not the blockbuster story here? Not that the Arizona "integrity" efforts are a farce of incompetence and snipe-hunting, but that a brazenly hoax-boosting party is using government funds to run an ongoing con aimed at "deepening" public "suspicions" about our democracy? That a new state government task force in Florida appears to exist mostly if not exclusively as a publicity stunt meant to discourage voters who the state itself has told now have the right to vote by dishing out maximum retribution to the bare handful who then did so in error?
This is not a question of incompetent or wasteful government. This is a hoax metastasizing into an anti-democratic movement that is now hardening into nameable state government departments and agencies, all of which have "make voting harder, scarier, and rarer" as core agenda. The point of Jennifer Wright's team is to make sure no claim of election "fraud" ever truly dies, and that was the point from the moment Republican hoax-promoters crafted it and gave it a budget.
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